The Big Lie

Chapter 13 Going down swinging

2009-11-17T14:19:00.000-08:00

(copyright David A. Kearns)

Tim Stanton sat in his office in Durham, North Carolina and watched the old videos from YouTube. He wasn’t reviewing stock UFO film. He was going over footage from famous UFO conferences pre-2010, trying to spot the debunkers and the government plants.
It was a little exercise in which he indulged himself when he needed to divert his mind from an emergency, which in this case came down to Chuck’s disappearance and the deaths of Dave and Tom.
Watching these tapes became one in any number of rituals that had erupted out of Tim’s growing sense of paranoia. He wanted to know what a government plant or a bad penny looked like. He knew they were coming for him now, if they weren’t already in his group, or perhaps working for him as a manager within his chain of stores.
At that moment Tim was watching an old clip of an interview with the widow of Dr. James E. McDonald, who was largely considered the Dean of UFOlogy. The moderator seemed intent on driving the discussion into a forum on socialist Marxism, which Betty McDonald had been an admitted devotee.
Here the man sat with Dr. Stanton Friedman, Betty, and the publisher of Firestorm, a compilation of the McDonald papers and biography written by Anne Druffel. The moderator wanted to ramble on and on about a larger galactic civilization, and socialism; blending the two in a ludicrous stew of inanity.
It reminded Tim of that old television series V, that began with an alien talking about “universal health care” as a goofy slap at the Obama administration.
Classic, thought Tim. He noticed that the moderator never seemed to look anyone in the eye. He seemed more an actor, putting on a scene in a movie, than a genuine human being.
Reviewing this sort of thing was an academic exercise anymore as someone, or something, began bumping off ufologists in 2010, just after Obama had made his announcement concerning UFOs that disappointed so many disclosure people. That announcement, bland and non-committal to the subject of UFOs as it had been, had saved thousands of NASA-related jobs. After all, who would fund an agency that had been lying for so many years, when there were so many earth-based problems to address? Space-defense a key lobby; their jobs lost in the immediate would have derailed a campaign.
Back in 2010, Tim hadn’t been aware of the deadly politics afoot with regard to disclosure. Not until Ryan had died the following year would his eyes begin to open.
At what cost had those saved jobs come? No new initiatives in clean energy, no changes to the auto industry, and UFOlogy had driven off the agenda and sent deep underground. MUFON had gone the way of NICAP, after so many defectors and government plants.
Tim turned away from the old computer terminal and sighed, leaned back in his chair and let his mind wander.
There was nothing he could do about Chuck, and whoever it had been sent to play Judas to Tim’s growing underground, they were good; real good, he thought. Because no one he knew seemed to be conforming to the role; no one was overly solicitous, or sucking up. No one was trying to get next to him to do him in. Either that or they were still en route, or, the government hadn’t bothered to send in a Judas yet. Maybe they planned on creating Judas out of clay found in situ; among Tim’s devotees.
Well, they would have done their homework, wouldn’t they? They would have anticipated a likeness of mind between Tim and Ryan; that is to say, not easily fooled and wary of any nail head that never quite sat flush with the wood.
He began humming to himself an old song from Sesame Street “One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn’t fit in…”
He still had a few hours to burn. He thought about Chuck and Dave, and the conversation he had had with both of them back in the summer of 2011, at Ryan’s funeral.
They had been walking on the beach. Chuck was the first among the group to see the relationship between what the aliens were doing, and what Cortez did with the Native Americans of Mexico. How the Indians turned on each other rather than face the outside enemy as a unified force.
“Yes, World Ender, that’s it. You must think back, and remember.”
Every now and then Tim could swear he heard Red Dancing Bear speaking with him in his mind.
“You must connect with Charles. Go to that memory of him, and he will find you there.”
Tim had seen Red that summer as well, in a dream after passing out on the beach. Then he had run into Red’s grandson, Stanley, just before Red died. Red had told Tim his spirit would be reborn within Stanley. Which - if you believed him - meant that Red was back on earth, walking and talking; sharing his special powers.
Red had always spoken of skills which were latent, but unique to the human species. These were tools that allowed the human being to ‘hear’ the thoughts of his loved ones, even after they had died. Tim didn’t know how much of this business he could believe, but, Red’s demonstrations; especially during the summer of 1981 had been nothing short of fantastic.
“Trust,” came the thought. Almost audible like a whisper.
Tim, got up from his desk, turned off the wall intercom, shut the light off and laid down on the sofa beside the sink.
He again directed his thoughts backward in time, to that day in 2011 soon after Ryan died. He could see Chuck and Dave running up to him on the beach from the north.
This must have been after they had spoken, somehow. There had been a gap there in the continuum, Tim recalled, where Dave and Chuck had gone, and Red suddenly appeared, or a dream of Red. Space and time were squishy when it came to anything to do with Red. It was like he carried the bubble of some sort of not-world around with him, and shared it with you when he talked to you. It had happened that day in June 2011 when Tim walked on the beach with Chuck and Dave before Ryan’s funeral. He ran into Red, but at some point, Tim had lost all track of time and space and passed out on the beach. He late attributed the gap in his memory to alcohol from the previous night, knowing full-well that explanation didn’t hold water either.
This had happened, then, or it was happening within that gap!
“Good, you are learning,” came Red’s voice.
They had both turned back to tell Tim something, but Dave is out of focus, smeared. Dave stopped jogging, and began a slow walk. Chuck kept coming forward.
Tim can hear the voice of Red Dancing Bear, as Chuck continued running down the beach.
“Red, where are we? When are we?”
“If you are ever to learn the way of things you will have to learn to trust,” came Red’s voice.
“Hard to, with so much going on,” Tim said as Chuck continued on.
“Then think of something else,” Red said.
“Such as..?”
“You think of the star out in the middle of the Milky Way Galaxy, that one day decides, well, shit, that’s it. I’m done. And the next thing you know, supernova.”
“Yeah?”
“Then you think of a planet, much like this one, just about 93 million miles away from it with a civilization on it much like ours. One that has been in existence for more than a quarter million years. A civilization wiped out in the blink of an eye, every man woman and child, along with every other bit of life on the surface of that planet, never to return again.”
“Yeah?”
“Sucks to be them, on that day, doesn’t it?”
“It does, sure.”
“Now I want you to take in a great big, deep breath.”
Tim did as he was told.
“What now?”
“In the time it took you to do that, what I just described happened a million times, all across the known universe.”
“So…? We don’t have it so bad?”
“All we are dealing with here, Tim, is a simple infestation; a test of our right to exist. We will either pass it, or fail it, and either way life here, will go on. That’s a better deal than what the other guy got, while you were busy breathing, don’t you think?”
“I guess you’re right,” Tim said, marveling that this was perhaps the first time Red had used Tim’s name, and not some cryptic handle like World Ender.
“No, you know I am right. So I want you to do something you’ve never thought you were capable of.”
“I know what you want me to do, but I don’t know if I am capable of it, Red.”
Tim could see Chuck now beginning to slow down. Pain written on his face.
“That’s inexcusable bullshit, Tim. Just sad, really, and I won’t accept it. Charles has suffered greatly to meet you here, at this time and this place, and you must believe, and you must reach out to him, in the way I have showed you before. You must allow yourself to go back, to then, in your mind, and meet him. And you must do it now…”
Tim exhaled slowly and held his breath, then exhaled. Chuck’s image came into stronger focus. He was exhausted, tired, worn out.
Tim broke into a light jog, then a full-on run to meet up with him. He could feel everything, the hot summer wind, the hard grit of the sand on his feet.
“That’s it, Tim. Quickly now, there’s barely any time left. You must hurry…”
He caught Chuck around the shoulders before he fell in a heap.
“I….have to tell you something, Tim. I…”
“I know Chuck, I know, calmly now, take it easy, breathe buddy,” Tim said.
“There’s a….a couple ….of names….”
“Okay, first, where are you, Chuck? Tell me that. Just tell me where we can find you…”
“Damn it Tim, there’s no time. You’ve got to listen to me. The names are Colonel Jason Epps, and Lt. Colonel Kurt Warner,” he gasped.
“Epps and Warner,” Tim said,
“No Tim, the ranks and the names, repeat them to me so I know you got it, man. Okay?”
Tim did.
"Now where are you?
“ They told me I’m in the desert Tim, somewhere outside Rachel, Nevada in an underground bunker. But you’ll never get to me in time. You’ve got to remember those names Tim, use them. He wants me to tell you to use them,” Chuck said.
“Chuck, you’ve got to hold on. We’re coming for you!”
“No you’re not, Tim. By the time you get here, if this is where I even am, I won’t be myself anymore, understand? It won’t be me, it will be someone else. They’re going inside Tim. They’re …they have some way to sift through my memories like the pages of a book, and I can feel it Tim, if they can do that, they can change me, take over. I don’t know how they do it, but this is something we never had a countermeasure for. Soon they’ll know….”
“Know what?”
“Everything. They will know all our plans. You have to get to Sean. I’ll fight as long as I can but you’ve got to warn Sean. They already suspect he’s with us…”
Chuck collapsed into a state of total unconsciousness.
Tim looked down at Chuck. He began to sob uncontrollably. He knew his buddy was close to death somewhere in the future. Tim looked up. He could see Dave in the distance jumping up and down, screaming something to him but it was as if a translucent wall had been placed between them. Dave knew too. Dave fell to his knees, sobbing, rolling over on his back, crying and rubbing his eyes. He knew his buddy was dying, the emotion distroying him, even though on some level, he was already well past dead himself.
Tim turned to call to Dave and then back to Chuck. Neither one was moving.
In an instant he felt himself being sucked outside his body .
He looked down to the beach below him and watched the earlier version of himself topple over in a heap, next to his friend. Chuck got up and wandered away in a daze with his buddy Dave, who was equally clueless as to what had just happened.
Tim swirled into the rays of sunshine like liquid travelling down a drain. The last thought he had before winking out again, was “we can go to places in time where the gaps are! We can go back, and if we can go back…”
All was blackness. No light, not sound, nothing.

*
The man called Grimes sat on the edge of the table near the old hooded bulb. His sleeves were rolled up like a FBI man from the 1930s interviewing a member of the Capone mob.
“You need to get you some better clothes, man,” Chuck began to sigh. His eyes were cloudy, unfocused like those of a drugged bear.
Grimes brushed the dust off his trousers and checked his old Timex watch.
“I will admit, Charles, you are demonstrating a great deal of resolve here. Of course it is an exercise in futility,” Grimes said.
“What’s your name, man?” Chuck asked.
“You didn’t give him your name, did you colonel?”
“His name is Epps. Jason Epps, colonel, US Air Force, and he’s a ma’fuckin faggit,” Chuck said with a nearly toothless smile.
“Brilliant Colonel. Remind me to recommend you for the dumbass star,” Grimes said.
“Any other pieces of information you compromised here, Colonel?” Grimes asked.
Epps looked at him and shook his head to the negative. Chuck merely smiled slyly through his remaining bloodied teeth.
“Charles, we will have everything, all of it, every last bit of information. Whether you know his name, my name, or the lat and long of where the Empire State Building is, it will not escape this room, because you won’t escape this room,” Grimes said.
“If you’re so sure, why ain’t you tell me your name, man?”
There was a pause.
“My name is Johnny Fucking Hamster-wheel, and I own you, you insignificant piece of shit. You feel that stuff working through your system? That’s not going to give up, understand me Charles? Imagine battery acid eating its way through your brain and your central nervous system, working its wall all the way into every cell, interrupting every synapse. It will not stop, it cannot be argued with, cursed at, called a faggot,” and there was smile here with the pause, “But different than plain old acid, in this case, what’s invading you is doing more than cleaning. In this case what we have injected you with is dropping little tiny seeds Charles. Little tiny, microscopic organisms which are a bit of biotech we’ve developed. Little angry nannites, and they just fucking hate human brain tissue, so much so they are busy turning it to something else. Despise it with a passion, Charles the way you hate cockroaches and spiders. The way you used to have nightmares about them when you were nine, and wet the bed so much your father tried to spank the tendency out of you,” he said.
“How did you…?”
“Oh, we know quite a bit about that, Charles. We know about those nightmares you had in 1973 before your family moved from Marietta, Georgia. Because what came for you that night, Charles wasn’t a very large cockroach. No sir, it wasn’t an owl, or a tiger, Charles, it was a friend of ours. A good friend who gave you a little gift, and took something from you in exchange.”
Chuck felt a tear escaping.
“Naughty, naughty Charles, let that strange woman with the big eyes do that to his wee-wee,” Grimes hissed.
“You cock-suckin...!”
“And so Charles had trouble for a time, holding his water. And so Charles got erections at strange times, and for strange reasons. Heavens, mom and dad even took him to a specialist, who did nothing but take their money. And he knew, just knew he was different from the other boys and girls didn’t he. He knew that aside from just being a black kid in a white world, he was also a dirty child, a sexualy deviant child, who couldn’t stop rubbing himself. Who used to go into a trance and pull out his penis. So sad, whatever are mommy and daddy to do with their boy?”
“So the other boys made fun, and so Chucky took up boxing, the only thing that helped. I mean, at least the name-calling stopped, but even that didn’t solve it, did it Charles. The itch was always there, wasn’t it, you dirty little fellow,” he said.
“When I get out of this…”
“ And so Charles had problems trusting sexual partners his whole, miserable, pointless life…” Grimes spat with a bitter flourish at the end. “Yes, there it is, the nerve center. All…those…wasted …relationships…”
What came from Charles’s throat didn’t sound human, but it did sound primate, and carried all the emotion of an earthly creature, a scream ending in a defeated cry.
“That’s it Charles. That’s it. Open those places, those unpleasant memories for us all, so that we might review them together. Charles wasting his seed with strippers; Charles breaking up with the only other woman in his life who loved him. Charles experimenting with all sorts of deviance in the name of finding out what it is he is missing. Thought he was gay for a while, didn’t he? And what a mistake that was. You’re either on the team or you’re not, eh Charles? He even thought he was in need of a sex change. Went back to girls, tried them older, younger, Asian, black, white, fetish, non fetish…even joined a vampire cult, didn’t he.”
“The great thing about LA Charles, it’s the fucking gateway to hell isn’t it. And so damned anonymous anymore, right? People know you but they don’t know you. They care, but they don’t care, isn’t that right Charles.”
“You best pray, mister, that they find you first,” Chuck said with a dying gasp.
Grimes held Chuck by the chin. Looked right into his eyes. It was the first time Chuck had considered the possibility.
No, it couldn’t be, could it?
“Charles, I am they. Silly… little… man!”
The slaps weren’t very hard, but they were just enough; sending Chuck into a renewed state of unconsciousness.
“He’s ready. Hook up the monitor and begin sifting. And so help me, colonel, you’d best not fuck this up. I leave it in your hands. There’s something I have to take care of.”

Chapter 12 Going Underground

2009-10-29T14:38:00.000-07:00

(You are viewing a novel in real-time, by David A. Kearns who maintains copyright. For reader enjoyment only. Not for republication in any form. The postings to this blog are chapters of The Big Lie, the second book in a UFO series.)

(Author's additional note: Stay tuned, comment, your participation in any form is appreciated.)

Tim Stanton, set the old hard-line fax phone down. The phone sat inside a room completely insulated for interference or electronic surveillance of any sort. It was a true, sealed, Faraday chamber that would have done credit to a government agency; a few years ago that is.
He had just been speaking with management of the Highjump Products Store in Breaux Bridge Louisiana. They were nice people; after a little coaxing, they began to understand what Tim was saying without saying; began to get the gist of his lingo.
It all made him feel like a character in some Graham Greene novel: “Is the package away?”
“Wha… oh yes, the package. Yes, it’s away, heh!”
Russ was en route to Tampa.
Every Highjump Products outlet had a wing to the offices which were reserved for Tim Stanton, and a cadre of managers he would meet with to discuss important company business. This wing was off-limits to the store employees.
The meeting schedule would change constantly, thus, employees never knew when Tim and his group would arrive. The store employees, from the manager on down to the cashiers all thought, this was to “keep them on their toes.” But that wasn’t the real reason, only a decent cover for the real reason.
These managers, who all arrived wearing the familiar company vest and jackets with the logo and name tags, weren’t really company officers, though they introduced themselves as such. Or perhaps sometimes, they were introduced as regional managers. They were directors of an underground network of what was now being called The Human Resistance. They had all signed The Human Declaration of Independence and Acts of War document. Two of those signers were now dead. A third, had been captured, his status was unknown.
They arrived, held a lengthy meeting in the private wings of these stores which could last for as long as two days, but very seldom longer. These managers along with their president and CEO even slept on cots and bunk beds near the managerial bathrooms and kitcheonetes.
But Tim knew this brand of the growing underground, was as outdated as his sealed Faraday chamber; as useless as that old Fax machine was.
It had been useful at one point to dumb down his forms of communication; use an ancient dial-up connection on old 486 machines between stores, but spies and watchers learned this game.
Then it came down to wiring coded instructions to resistance members through Western Union with gobs of cash, but that system was also discovered.
In an age now, where conceivably every single human being had a desktop computer, a powerful one at that, inside his head and was in constant streaming communication with the internet, where would you be able to hide anymore? What method would work?
“Mr. Stanton!” came a voice over the intercom.
“Yes, Marcie,” he replied.
“You told me to interrupt you of any important world news,” she said.
“Sure, what’s happened?”
“You’ll want to turn on CNN,” she said, then disconnected.
Tim went over to his desktop and moved the old mouse and said “CNN”.
The image of Evan Katzenberg came to life. It was from an old interview. At the bottom of the screen there was a ticker reading “DIRECTOR EVAN KATZENBERG,WIFE SARAH, DEAD IN HOUSE FIRE.”
“…I think Hollywood should have evolved from the days of blacklisting writers, actors and directors, and yet here we are. There was a reason we stopped putting propaganda in the movies. We stopped making them the public relations arms of the armed services and corporations. Now you have intelligence agencies from here and abroad behind all this muscle, and intimidation. I mean, I’ve been about keeping the art-form pure.”
“Aren’t you concerned for your relationships within the industry?” the interviewer asked.
“ Yeah, and I hear what you’re asking even though you can’t specifically ask it. But I ask you, why do you say that? Because I happen to show the humanity of some of my characters who also happen to be Palestinian, or Lebanese or whatever? That doesn’t make me a bad Jew, that happens to make me a good one,” he said. “Take that issue out of it: whatever happened to the artist challenging any sort of dogma, any sort of move toward mental uniformity? What, we’re not supposed fight against that anymore, or what we’re saying is either follow in lock-step with the party line, or, you’re out? No better than McCarthyism.”
The image shifted to the burned-out scene; a charred hulk of a house in Malibu.
“Fire Rescue is indicating that the explosion may be the result of a faulty gas valve in the home. Katzenberg was 57 years old. He and his wife leave behind two young children who were staying with relatives at the time of the explosion.
“Jesus,” sighed Tim.
He picked up the phone again. It might not be as secure as he wanted it, but he had to step up the meeting time-table. They all needed to get here, as soon as humanly possible.

*
“Man, I just knew there was something wrong with the government,” Tibby LeBlanc said after hearing the whole story.
The sixty foot fishing trawler was somewhere southwest of Pensacola. The sun was directly upon them but, there was a solid breeze out of the southwest. They stood in the pilot house watching the gulls swirl around the upper works and radio gear. The gulls were waiting for a quick meal that wasn’t coming anytime soon, this being a transport mission disguised as a fishing trip.
“Oh yeah. See, our buddy Ryan used to talk about what the lie does, to everything and everybody,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“He said it works like an infectious disease whose main outcomes are insanity and evil. He told us it was a mathematical certainty, sort of like an equation. The bigger the lie, the worse the insanity and evil working itself out on the other side.”
“Sounds like a philosopher more than a computer engineer,” Tibby said.
“You and he were close?” Tibby asked.
“Not as close as I would have liked. He was best friends with Tim,” Russ said.
“The guy who runs Highjump,” he said.
“Yeah, well, it’s complicated but, Ryan actually helped Tim with the start-up funds for the company. The company works as a front for the underground that we are growing,” Russ said.
“Day-um,” Tibby said. “And this Ryan killed himself?”
“That’s the official version. Tim said an assassin took him out in 2011, but he knew it was coming, and that he couldn’t escape it, so he hatched his plans, to get the movement started,” he said.
“Man you hear about this sort of thing, but deep down you find it hard to imagine it actually happening,” Tibby said.
“There are people working for the government agencies and contractors who are more evil than you can possibly imagine, Tibby. I’ve had some direct experience with this in Central America,” Russ said.
“What do you suppose they want from us, Russ?”“Them?” Russ asked.
“Yeah, them,” Tibby said, with his eyes rolling upward nervously.
“Nothing good, Tibby. That much we know for sure. Nothing good,” Russ said.

*
“No sir, he’s not telling us a damned thing and at this rate, we’ll lose him,” came the voice of Colonel Epps. He was on his secure line again, speaking to someone.
“No sir, and I am not a doctor. The extent of his injuries are getting to a point that…”
There was a pause.
Chuck was amazed to know he was still alive, still marking time in this situation. The beatings, stabbings, slicing and chemical burns had stopped, for the time being anyway.
Who could he be talking to now? Not Lt. Colonel Kurt Warner, thought Chuck.
Whoever it was, Epps was afraid of him. That meant someone higher than both Epps and Warner on the pecking order. He had to get that name, and add it to his list. Chuck struggled to bring his mind into a state of full consciousness. He was in the fight of his life and he knew it.
It was a fight he could not physically win, but he might psychically win it, unless they had more tricks up their sleeves.
Whoever the cold bastard was down the end of the phone, he was the sort who would have more ammunition.
“I’ll await your arrival, sir.”
“Charles I am truly impressed,” Epps said hanging up the phone. “You may have just cost me my career…”
“I plan on …costing you….your life, colonel Jackass,” Chuck managed to respond in breathless gasps.
Epps snickered.
Chuck managed to look around the room with his remaining good eye.
“Where did your scumbags…go?” he asked.
Epps folded his arms.
“I read in your file you had been a boxer, before you took up surfing,” Epps said.
Chuck spat a gob of blood and teeth out of his mouth. He ignored the colonel.
“Scumbags couldn’t take it huh? Had to get new scumbags, had to call in the second string, see …if they could do a …better job,” Chuck sighed, closing his eyes.
His head lolled off to the side again.
“Get some rest, Charles. You’re going to need it,” Epps said.

Chapter 11 Down in the Hole

2009-10-20T07:53:00.000-07:00

(You are viewing a novel in real-time, by David A. Kearns who maintains copyright. For reader enjoyment only. Not for republication in any form. The postings to this blog are chapters of The Big Lie, the second book in a UFO series.)

3: 20 a.m. Dec. 14, 2014. 56 miles from Rachel, Nevada
Chuck tried to open his eyes but he couldn’t. If this was a hangover- and he dearly hoped that’s all this was - it was a world ender, a true come to Jesus.
He scanned his memories but they were loose, jumbled, ephemeral like the images made by oil poured on water.
He remembered the waters of the Indian River; got an old memory of gasoline dripping out of a flooded 15 horsepower engine at the back of a john boat, swirling into the stream.
Chuck, along with Jay Malone, and Ryan Cogswell had been fishing for whatever they could get their hands on. They decided to change fishing holes but the engine wouldn’t start, and so Jay had flooded it by over-pumping the ball on the fuel line. When he realized what he had done, he let some drain out into the bottom of the fiberglass boat. Then he bailed it out into the river with a plastic scoop made from the top half of a discarded milk jug. That day, Chuck had watched the iridescent gas slicks’ light-play on the water, like the multicolored surface of a soap bubble.
Jay Malone bailed the rest of the water out of the bottom of the boat while the engine settled, and set the jug scoop down. As a young man he had been handy like that. If something was broken, Jay would fixed it. If you had a lure that was snagged on a rock or whatever, and you really wanted to keep that lure, more often than not, Jay could figure out a way, either by working the boat around for a better angle, or tweaking the drag on a spinning rod just so. Damned if he didn’t get it back for you nine times out of ten. That was Jay.
Ryan took off his shirt, leaned back and rested his head on the bow bench while Jay worked. Ryan used his T-shirt as a sort of pillow that also shielded his eyes from the afternoon sun; his knees sticking up in the air; those impossibly long shins covered with animal hair over his gigantic monkey feet. Ryan should have run track, with feet like that. He should have, but he considered such suggestions blasphemy, inviting him to betray his true love, surfing.
The boat was quite literally in the middle of the river channel now. Anyone could come along in a larger vessel and …
“You worry too much, Chuck. Don’t you see? Jay’s got it all figured out,” Ryan said.
Chuck hadn’t said a word, so how had Ryan known what he was thinking? Well that was Ryan, wasn‘t it: psychic, seeing these before they happened; hearing conversations before anyone opened their mouth. Tim said this is what made Ryan such a good computer engineer later in life.
But this memory was from the summer of their seventeenth year. A really good year. Chuck loved that year which is why he was replaying it in his mind now. He needed this like food, like a sugar cube given to a wolf trapped in a claw trap; like a cat injured by a speeding car might purr just before….
For the first time in recent memory, Ryan had seemed to be happy at peace. He was funny like that. There was nothing like a little uncertainty with a touch of pseudo-danger thrown in to get Ryan to smile.
Jay wiped off his sweaty brow and prepared to restart the motor.
“You could help, Cogswell, Geez…”
“Now Jay, why the hell would I do something so stupid, as to deprive you the joy of saving our lives from these dangerous waters?” Ryan said.
Ha, dangerous waters of the Indian River lagoon, a three-mile wide, flat-calm expanse of heaven between the mainland and the barrier island.
They all stopped for a moment and let the sights, smells and sounds of the Indian River seep into them: the slapping of the small waves on the hull; the incidental puff of a hot breeze as it traveled across the water from the mainland; the rumble of distant thunder coming from the towering clouds over the St. Johns marsh twenty miles to the west; the piercing cry from an osprey fighting to keep a mullet in its clutches as it flapped toward the Australian pines on the far shore.
They all smiled at Ryan cynically, but also with a touch of gratitude in their glances. Every now and then they needed to be reminded how good they had it, how trivial their problems really were. Boyhood was disappearing fast; they needed to stop, look around and savor it like warm sunshine on a cold day. They would miss these days, in years to come.
Jay shook his head, pulled the starter cord. The engine came to life, and time moved on.
It was probably then that Chuck got his first glimpse into the magic of young Ryan Cogswell, and why Tim seemed so devoted to his buddy. They had their little girlfriends and so on but, Tim Stanton and Ryan Cogswell were brothers in everything but name.
He had admired and was somewhat envious of this relationship, but in the end, he counted himself more than anything proud to be a member of this little group that included Russ, Jay, Gary, Talky-Tom, and Dave…
What had happened to Dave? There was an image, something Chuck didn’t want to recall; surely it had been an elaborate nightmare.
In some reality somewhere, Dave had been shot in the chest, three times. That was the world Chuck didn’t want to live in right now. He didn’t want to remember what came next in that twisted dream.
In his mind, Chuck walked along Melbourne Beach pier, perhaps it had been later on that afternoon of his fishing outing. He had paused on the pier as the sun set, and gazed down again into the waters of the lagoon.
The old Native American was there by his side soon enough; the way he was prone to sneaking up on him from time to time throughout Chuck’s childhood. The Indian had an old cast-net made from cloth fiber he was tossing into the shallows. Skunked for now, he stopped and wandered up to Chuck, who smiled.
This was Red’s way: to be there, and then to be gone for a long time again, after imparting some wisdom. He was a lonely friendly figure around Melbourne Beach during the early 1980s. No one knew precisely where he came from or what he did for a living. At times he was lighthearted, joking, at others he was serious. Chuck knew this was going to be one of those serious talks.
“You must remember everything that happens to you,” the Indian said.
“How you been?” Chuck said.
With Red you always found the conversation had started without you. He didn’t bother with hello or goodbye. Regardless of Chuck’s efforts to get the old man to conform to the norms of polite conversation, Red steadfastly sloughed these efforts off.
“It could not have been easy, growing up among white boys, as they can be difficult,” Red said randomly. “Your old man was in the Air Force, imagine how hard it was for him.”
“I know, but I never thought of these guys as white, did I Red?”
“No, these truly are your brothers,” Red said.
“Truth be told, Red. I was harder on them at first, then they were on me,” Chuck said.
“That was to be expected. You had a right to be defensive. It makes good sense,” he said.
“I couldn’t asked for better friends, Red. Or a better place to grow up,” Chuck said.
“Then you must honor them. You must remember, everything, do you hear me, Charles? These are your brothers, you must not betray them, but you must remember what you see, for them, because they will seek you out in those places of the mind where you can no longer go physically,” Red Dancing Bear said.
“You’re saying I might not make it out of this?”
“I am saying, a warrior must be prepared, and a warrior must use weapons he is not even aware he posses,” the old Seminole said.
Red Dancing Bear turned and walked eastward off the pier and into the enveloping darkness with his cast net draped over his shoulder.
Chuck drifted back into a deeper state of unconsciousness.

*
Hey, Russ, buddy! Wake up. We almost there,” said the man driving a pick up truck over the sandy trail winding through the Louisiana bayou.
Russ woke, yawned and stretched. It had been a rough thirty hours or so.
He had taken the Trailways along I -10 as far as Breaux Bridge, Louisiana when he was shown the need to drastically change his plans by the man sitting next to him, Tibby LeBlanc.
The scanners on the seat backs were dialed in to a wireless router on the overhead camera, loaded with NORA software. Tibby pointed this out. NORA recognized your face. It was the same software package pioneered by the Vegas casinos to catch cheaters and card counters. Now the government used it, nationwide.
Homeland Security gained authority to make the devices standard on all forms of public transportation.
His new pal, Tibby had picked up on Russ’s nervousness half way across Texas as Russ repeatedly leaned over the seatback trying to catch snatches from CNN Internet off the man in front of him, who had an older version of Holovision playing on his iBrain.
“You on probation, ain’t you?” Tibby started in.
Russ nodded. This sounded like an excellent lie.
“And you skipped town all the same, thinking they can’t find you on a bus.”
Russ nodded again.
“They ain’t give you the chip?”
Chips, locator implants by Savante were used when the old, outdated ankle collars with GPS were phased out.
“No, they didn’t,” Russ said.
“You must have had you a good lawyer,” Tibby had said.
“Something like that,” Russ had said.
“Yep, that’s how de got me four years ago. But see, all these buses got the Smartlife and the NORA,” Tibby said pointing to the black box coated in dark glass on the top of the seatback.
“How long since you rode a bus?” Tibby asked.
“I’ve been getting used to it recently,” Russ said.
“The scanner in there got every inch of your face the second your ass hit the seat. It may take a little while, but de get you all de same. So if you running from the lawman, you got to bob an‘ weave, bob an‘ weave, like a cat on de freeway, son. Pretty soon they have all this Smartlife business in real-time. You won’t be able to so much as hop on de bus if you’s in trouble with the lawman.”
“You seem to know an awful lot about all this,” Russ said.
“Name’s Thibedeaux LeBlanc. My friends just call me Tibby,” Tibby said.
Tibby went on to recount two Thibedeaux/Boudreaux jokes which Russ could barely make out.
It turned out Tibby had done Federal time in Texas after an anemic attempt to rob the bank that had foreclosed on him in 2009. His heart hadn’t been in it. He had spent the entire previous night drinking when the idea occurred to him. It was more like a confused protest of grandiosity.
The cops arrived outside as he stumbled around the vault with the bank manager. He had told everyone else to get out then let the manager go as well. He thought for a minute about suicide, decided against it, and then fell asleep in the vault. The 12 gauge shotgun, hadn’t even been loaded. The charges how ever, were federal; since he crossed a state line with a weapon used in the commission of a felony.
Jail time had been relatively light: two years.
“But they got to make room for more people whose had dey houses nicked off ‘em,” Tibby said. He was not very found of the government.
“Neither am I,” Russ said. Tibby smiled and continued his little autobiography.
Tibby had gone back to for a court appearance concerning his own violation of probation, and had taken a bus so that his pick-up truck, which was stripped of Smartlife, wouldn’t be attached to him as far as the record went.
Tibby ran a fleet of shrimp boats with an uncle.
Something about Tibby made Russ trust him implicitly..
So, after a while of talking with him, Russ’s new, revised plan was to go to New Iberia with Tibby, and from there take a boat to Tampa: a boat trip paid for by funds sent from Tim Stanton drawn from the cash drawer at the Highjump Products store in Breaux Bridge. A store in which the LeBlanc family, it turned out, were associate managers, salespeople, and cashiers many of them; all except for Tibby who went sidewise of the law when that bank foreclosed on three hundred acres in St. Martin parish that had been in family hands for nearly two-hundred years.
Russ looked at Tibby smiling so big next to him as the bus stopped outside of Tibby‘s hometown. “What’s funny?”
“You saying you and the president and owner of Highjump stores are good friends, and here you running cross country looking like a wet dog,” Tibby had said.
With that Tibby LeBlanc had taken Russ Bridges into his home, given him a change of clothes, two home-cooked meals prepared by his wife and daughters, and now was planning to help Russ get to Tampa.
The next morning they bounced along in an old beater pick-up truck toward the marina as the sun rose.
“You were talking about someone named Chuck in your sleep, just now. Who’s that?” Tibby said. “Chuck’s in trouble. Some people have him, Tibby, some very bad people. Same people who killed another friend of mine,” Russ said.
“I guess I know’d they’d be more to that story you told me. I expect you’ll let it all out when you good and ready to, Russ,” Tibby said.
“This is more than your average VOP,” Tibby added.
“The less you know, the better for you,” Russ said.
“You got you a choke hold on that folder, Russ. You was on the couch and my daughter tried to take it out of your hands and put it on the table. You jess curled up with it like it was your baby,” Tibby said.
“I can’t thank you and your family enough, Tibby,” Russ said.
“We ain’t got you to Tampa, yet. You thank us when we get you there,” Tibby said.
“Who’s piloting the boat?” Russ asked.
“I expect I will, Russ,” Tibby said.
Russ breathed a heavy sigh of relief and Tibby smiled.

*
“I want someone to get Lt. Colonel Kurt Warner on the line,” said the voice.
There was a man in the room, holding one of those ancient telephones in his hand. The man had sandy hair, bristly at the top. His eyes were cold.
“I’ll wait,” said the man.
Chuck closed his eyes and listened.
“Tell him Colonel Epps needs to speak with him, stat. That’s an order, Lieutenant,” said the voice.
“Warner, we have an issue that I am addressing here. When I say you need to …fine, fine Warner. Listen. Sundown is blown, understand? It’s dead, so you need to plan accordingly,” the man said.
The was a snapping sound. The man had just snapped his fingers and ordered someone to do something.
Chuck felt a harsh slap to his face, saw a blinding flash in his eyes. Whomever, knew he was awake, and listening.
Now he remembered it all, the front tires of his car shot out; the crash into the light pole. Being dragged off a bloody air bag, thrown into a van. He recalled the injection that sent him to a very dark place for what felt like days on end.
Chuck was dragged to a chair in the center of the room. He felt sick to his stomach. He had been fitted with an bag of IV fluids. He wore a hospital gown. But this was no hospital. He was in a dark, dank room, like the hallway behind a food court at a mall. Bare cinder blocks, a water main, a ladder leading to closed metal door in the ceiling. He got the feeling of oppressive weight around the walls, as though he was underground somewhere.
The simple metal gurney where had lain for who knew precisely how long. The desk that the man sat on. The soiled sofa and adjoining arm chair where sat the other two: What were they? Chinese? Indonesian, Central American, Or Thai? The evil motorcyclists, who had killed Dave with no more thought than swatting a fly.
“That operation is blown, but you need to put a nail in it,” the man said.
“Who? Who do you think?”
There was a pause in the one-sided dialogue. This man, Kurt Warner, was fighting back on the other end of the line. Whatever it was, he didn’t want to do it.
“There is going to be a news item that will surface about this situation. Yes, something like that. That will be the official story. There is no other story, understand? Fine then since you’re only halfway on board Warner this is how it will be,” the man said.
Chuck leaned over and winced. He was in deep pain. He might not get anymore information than this.
Lt. Colonel Kurt Warner. Lt. Colonel Kurt, he thought trying to force the thought into his subconscious mind.
“Mr. Naigles?” came a pleasant voice.
Chuck lifted his head. He looked right into the eyes of the man before him.
“Mr. Naigles, I am Colonel jason Epps,” he said.
“Thanks for telling me,” Chuck said.
“Let’s talk about how this will go, Mr. Naigles,” Epps said. “You are in a below-ground bunker in Nevada, in the desert.
“When they find, you. That is to say, if they find you. Your body will be half chewed to pieces by animals. We have film on you at several casinos in town, blowing through a shit-load of money. It’s really quite sad actually, you never did get over that gambling addiction, did you, Mr. Naigles,” the colonel said.
“You want to know something?” Chuck said.
“Why don’t I go fuck myself?” Epps asked.
“Yeah, something like that,” Chuck said.
“I don’t suppose it would surprise you to learn, that I need some information from you, would it Mr. Naigles?”
“And I can either die quickly or slowly?”
“Something like that,” said Epps.
“Colonel Jason Epps let me ask you something, since you’re in an honest mood?”
“Fine, as long as you know, you’re not getting out of this alive, I don’t see what the harm could be. This facility is lined with three feet of lead, buried below ground, a completely self contained sealed facility,"Epps said.
“What office of the government do you work for?”
“I am a colonel in the Air Force attached to the Office of Investigative Services,” the man said.
“And you guys just go around killing private citizens?”
“You mean citizens who signed this?” Epps said, holding up the Human Declaration of Independence And Acts of War, drafted by Ryan Cogswell, dated July 2, 2011.
“Charles, the thing about a document like this is, once you sign it, it’s like you’re placing you ass in my hands and saying, ‘fuck away. Colonel! Fuck me in the ass!”
“How nice for you,” said Chuck.
“You gave up your rights as a citizen of this country the minute you signed this document advocating the destruction of public property or mayhem to officials changed with protecting this country,” Epps said.
“So we’re doing this?” Chuck asked. “We’re going to debate this issue, now? Before you off me?”
“If you like, I find that I have some time,” Epps said.
Chuck focused hard on the man’s face. He wanted to remember every bit of scar tissue. He spat toward the man but he raised his right hand to deflect the spray.
“So you’re a righty,” Chuck said.
“Why is that important to you,” Epps said.
One of the motorcyclists got up and slapped Chuck hard.
“Stay on task, Charles. You have questions for me, but my time is short,” Epps said.
“Why Dave?”
“Because Mr. Finklestein had no vices that could be used to discredit him after his death. He was the victim of a robbery gone bad. You mourned the loss of your friend, forgot the fact you’ve gone 13 months without so much as touching a poker chip, and back you slid. You offended some mob types in your round of the casinos and that was that, as they say.”
“I get it. What are you hoping to gain by working with them?”
“Them?”
“Those things, in the saucers, or whatever. The non-humans,” Chuck said.
“You and your misguided little troupe of declaration signers, seem to think there is some sort of choice in the matter, that we have the option to do otherwise? Do something other than precisely what we are told to do,” Epps said.
“My dad was in the Air Force too, Colonel Epps. As was…”
“Who, you friend Ryan's father, Douglas Cogswell? Yes, we are aware of that,” Epps said.
“I’m just glad my old man didn’t live to learn what a bunch of mother-fucking pussies rose up to run the show in the end,” he said. “You’re killing your own people, rather than face an overwhelming enemy. Question one is, why do we bother paying you? And question two: how does your pussy-ass fucking sleep at night?” Chuck said.
This time it was Epps who bitch-slapped Chuck with the back of his hand.
“You judgmental little prick. You spend your whole life cutting deals in Hollywood, running around on your wife. She dumps you, so you take to gambling, damned near lose that house of yours in Malibu, which doesn’t really matter since you’ve no one left to leave it to anyway, and you have the nerve to judge me? You’re the pimp here, Charles, not me. I’ve spent my life serving this country, and that flag. I serve them to this day. I’ll be serving them the moment we put a bullet in your brain,” Epps said.
“So get on with it then, Jackass. If you’re too chicken-shit to even be honest with me, why are you wasting your time and mine?”
“Honesty? That’s what you want?”
“Yeah! By the time I’m dead, I think I’ll have earned it, buddy. Because I think I was right when I signed that piece of paper, and having met you, I know damned well I was right, and you can justify and knock me around, but in the end you’re the pussy. You can’t be honest with a man you are about to murder, a man tied to a chair who can’t fight back,” Chuck spat.
“The truth is, Charles, you and your friends have no idea precisely what it is we’re dealing with, here,” Epps said.
“Hey, why would we, man? We have no idea because we’re playing catch-up here. Because you people have been keeping all the damned answers from us?! You’ve been keeping the technologies for your little goddamned club.”
“And what club is that, Charles?”
“Defense contractors, people who make flying drones of death and Smartlife to keep us all in the box, waiting for the bombs, when we should be waiting for and fearing those assholes with the big eyes!
“Meantime, this greenhouse thing? That could have been solved back in the 1970s if you had released the information on energy tech, the advances to transportation all of it..”
“And then what, Charles, start a new arms race with the Soviets? Empower communism with flying black triangles that can kill us just as easily as we can now kill the Chinese and everyone else? Your little cadre of fools is so damned naïve, it simply amazes me that educated men…!”
“Colonel Epps, who’s being naïve here? Us or you! You think these beings haven’t given all this stuff to the Chinese, too, so we can all wipe each other out while they watch? You think all of us aren’t in play here? Who’s foolish, us, because we can smell what’s coming, or you, jackass, still saluting the flag and murdering your own citizens in the name of the very same United States of America you killed when you began lying to us all!? “
Epps sat, stone-faced. But he had revealed something, just enough. It was a guilty tick; a twitch of the top, left eyelid, accompanied by a slight flutter of the cheek muscle below. It was enough for Chuck to pick up on, and Epps knew it.
Epps clenched his jaw and hissed; “That’s certainly an interesting theory, Charles, but the Joint Chiefs…”
“Naw, that’s bootleg. You’re not stupid enough to be a true believer, Epps. I’ve spent a career reading faces in the boardroom, and across the card table. You’re right about my problem but you ain’t special and different either.
“ You’re garden-variety. I know what you are,” Chuck hissed.
“Oh really? And what is that?”
“You‘re a sell-out, an easy folder. You folded, for us. And I suppose there was a pay-out, or the promise of one.”
“Yes well, obviously you’re way wrong here…”
“No, Epps. C’mon, you boys on the inside of this thing think you’ve got some sweetheart deal worked out them, don’t you? Think you’ll be raptured like the Seventh Day by these monsters? I got news for you, baby, you’re the fucking appetizer, and the rest of us will be the goddamned main course if your get your way.
“Let me be the first to wish you and your friends the fires of hell if there is such a place. Because Epps you have waaaay screwed the pooch. You’ve miscalculated.”
“Really, how can you be so sure?”
“Because, you’ve bluffed, and you’ve lost, dumbass. Nothing left to bargain with, or did you miss that day at the Air Force Academy?”
“Are you quite finished, Charles?”
“Yeah, I think so. Do what you’ve got to do, man. I’m ready,” Chuck said.
“Fine, as per our understanding, there is something I will need from you,” Epps said.
“Really? Fuckin’ amaze me, bro: what is it you need from me?”
“ I will need to know everything you know about the inside of your little outfit. I need to know when and where Mr. Tim Stanton moves. I will need to know any connections your group may have with Senator Sean Cogswell…”
“Who?”
“…I will need to know where Russ Bridges is, and I will need to know precisely what Evan Katzenberg gave you yesterday; and where that special something is, right now,” Epps said.
“That’s a big laundry list, Colonel Epps. Good luck with that!” Chuck said.
“There will be quite a bit of pain, Charles…”
“Bring it on, motherfucker. Let me show your pussy ass, what a real man is capable of, one who doesn’t sell out like you did,” Chuck said.

Chapter 10 Devil Rave

2009-10-15T11:07:00.000-07:00

(Copyright David A. Kearns, all rights reserved)

11:30 p.m. Dec. 13, 2014. Orlando Florida

Kyle Cogswell finished Tweeting his uncle, Sean. He was so proud of his uncle; wanted to be just like him. And why not? Women practically fell over with their legs in the air at Sean Cogswell‘s feet. And if they didn’t actually do so, you could tell they wanted to. It was rumored his uncle was seeing some hot vamp who was married. But Kyle didn’t believe it. He didn’t know if his uncle bothered with relationships. He certainly wasn’t the type to be involved in any torrid romances.
He knew that people in Sean’s office would get word to him that his nephew needed to speak with him eventually. It would take a few DMs through Twitter. Sean was up on that, all his dad’s friends were for some reason. For a group of older guys they were all very sophisticated and knowledgeable about technology. They even code names that changed every three or four days, as if they were being spied on like a gang of meth-selling bikers or something. More than once, Kyle had heard the men refer, only half-jokingly, to their little “underground.”
Uncle Sean had his office’s Tweet sight as well as four other accounts. Kyle used the touchpad system on an old iPhone his sister had loaned him. He liked using that rather than iBrain which gave him a massive headache. Didn’t own one of those either. The one he brought tonight was borrowed from CC.
Kyle was seventeen now. He could drive. His hair was sandy brown, and they said he had eyes just his father’s; the color of shallow, clear seawater over turtle grass, greenish blue. His was filling out too. Weighed just over 190, could run a 17 minute, 5 k and bench 200 pounds of free weights, fifteen times. He could knock out a thousand push ups, one hundred at a clip, in the space of an hour. He was meeting with a recruiter for the U.S. Marines in four days. This was his last year at Melbourne High School, where his father had gone, as had his dad’s best friend Tim Stanton, president and CEO of Highjump Products.
Tim was a mentor to him, but what Kyle really wanted was for his father to be a mentor. But Ryan Cogswell had been dead for nearly five years. So, in second place, he wanted his uncle Sean, war hero to be his mentor; to tell him everything he could about his dad, Ryan. What he got was Tim; always sort of hovering with his own brand of oversight: always checking up on him, through the Malone family “uncles” Gary and Jay, who had also been friends of his father’s during his high school years, who themselves were constantly informed through Jay‘s son, Chase, a freshman cornerback at UCF, and Kyle’s lifelong surfing buddy.
He knew something special had happened to his dad and their little surf crew way back in the 1980s, but he wasn’t sure what it was. It was something that made these men bond like foxhole veterans, as though they had seen battle.
He couldn’t figure out his uncle Sean, the senator. He always seemed so sad, and aloof, as though he knew something bad was about to happen, couldn’t stop it, but at the same time, whatever it was, he couldn’t tell you about it either.
Mom Debra, was no help. His sister Charity, had her own problems growing up. CC was just so damned smart, it was infuriating. Probably going to Harvard, or MIT where she would skip class and still ace everything.
Kyle struggled academically by comparison but did well enough that his own friends considered him to be pretty smart. He sort of surprised himself with a 1590 on the SAT. But he wanted action. Wanted battle, like his uncle had seen. Wanted to gain that worldly, handsome gaze of the family men were so proud of. He had seen the photos of his granddad, Douglas, who had served in the Air Force in whatever secret capacity it had been. He liked the way the man looked, so strong, confident, alive; facing the challenge. Uncle Sean had that look, same hair color, eye color, same stony strength, only just a bit sadder. Kyle knew it had something to do with the death of his father. They said Ryan had been one of the most intelligent men to come along in his generation, and that intelligence had enabled him to look into things, that in the end, drove him to insanity and suicide. Yet somewhere in his heart Kyle knew that wasn‘t the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, as they say. He knew that Uncle Sean was aware of what exactly happened, and that Sean was secretly dreading that long conversation where he explained it.
“Cogswell! WTF bro?” came the voice of Chase Malone.
Chase was nothing like his dad, Jay the former mayor of Melbourne Beach and real estate guy. Chase was more fun, like his own uncle, Gary. The men of the tribe said Chase even fought like Gary. He certainly wasn’t afraid of a little dust up every now and then.
“Leave your uncle alone, man. He’ll get back to you when he can! Jeezus,” Chase said.
Chase was lucky. The Knights had a shot at a national title this year. Chase was hilarious. Off the wall sense of humor. He had wanted someone to go with him to one of these devil raves. They were getting pretty wild, he said.
“C’mon man, it’ll be a hoot. All those freakin’ weirdo’s zoning out on whatever, doin’ their thing! Who knows, might be some hot girls in it for us.”
“Chase I don’t think it’s that kind of gig, man,” Kyle said. He had done a little internet search. But Chase had been curious and so he bugged and bugged his surfing buddy until he relented at last. Chase didn’t do ‘no.’
‘No’ was for pussies.
Gotha was a giant warehouse with a huge stage off I-Drive. The warm up act wasn’t half bad; some Aerosmith-Run DMC tribute band. But everyone was here to see Feathered Lizard; the new thrash-hop group fronted by this demonic looking guy who called himself Quetzalcoatl. Clearly the man was unbalanced and manic depressive in the Marilyn Manson mien. As per notorious custom, the artist was late to the gig, so Kyle had taken the opportunity to run back near the johns and try to get his uncle to call him back.
These freaks in the bubble trying to sell him neural enhancers were really annoying. All Paul wanted was a damned Pepsi. All they had was “Red Bull Kava-Kava,” and something called “Ginseng speedballs”.
His uncle Sean seldom got back to him right away. Kyle really wanted his input into whether he should go to college and then try to get into the officer program, or just enlist, like Sean had; see some action, get his education through the marines as he went. Sean got a BS in communications from them, and an MBA. Yeah, he saw some action too, six tours; Iraq, Afghanistan, some time in Pakistan.
His uncle gave off signals like there was something massive he wanted to say, but couldn’t. Kyle felt like the marines was the way to go, but he knew his uncle had deep, deep reservations about the whole thing; just knew it.
Why won’t he tell me? Why won’t he at least talk to me?
“God damn, dude! You are such a GIRL! C’mon, do that shit later. We got to get close to the stage before the bubblers take all the good spots, man!”
As they walked through the crowd during the intermission, Kyle could see that they were very nearly too late. The bubblers indeed were lining up. Savante had also rented out big chunks of the general admission area for their bubblers, many of whom wore the neon-colored Savante T-shirts. When the strobes and black-lights whirled through the throng, these would light up with multi-colored creatures, sea turtles that paddled, flowers that made use of holo-tech and seemed to briefly bloom and close, bloom and close. Those in the bubble, saw a kalidescope of colors and images.
“Did you bring your iBrain, dude?”
“I have my sister’s,” Kyle said.
The device looked like a half head-band that wrapped around the ears and hooded the sides of the eyes. They were so compact you could fold them up and put them in your pocket.
“Your’s 3-G holo?”
“It’s upgraded to 3-G, yeah,” Kyle said sheepishly.
“Fuckin’ bubblers, man. I can’t stand ‘em,” Chase said. “Think they’re the shit.”
Bubblers didn’t have to have a headband of any kind. Their upgrade, 4-G, was a chip inside the skin. You had everything on tap. The voice activation system was a sequence of key words, which holoed you right to your desk-top. If you had the fast touch, it drove into your favorites and presented them split-screen translucent.
Increasingly, people were living more and more in the bubble. You drove down I-95 and pop-ups came into view, demarking hotels gas stations. Little down arrows just over the tree line, with the symbols above them McDonalds, Howard Johnson, etc. Did away for the need of those advanced plasma diode windshields. It killed that whole market like Walmart taking down the mom and pop grocer.
Good for the environment, they said. No need for billboards. Business paid a service fee and bam, that was it.
Savante was on this whole green kick these days: in every way imaginable the Neural Network “N-squared” was pitched as means by which the world would go green and who could argue? Aren’t you green? Don’t you want things to go green? What’s wrong with you!
What a joke, he thought. What a bunch of damned phonies!
Kyle supposed once his orders came through, he’d be inside the bubble on MarineComm A, or B depending on which route he went, but, he’d have to get used to that for the full ride. Once you did that, you agreed to their programming for the duration of your service, and then some if you signed confidentiality agreements.
There were new bills going through congress now to curtail some of all this, but how could you argue with something that also could be used to cure blindness?
They were looking into it, but for practical purposes, it was true. You tuned in and bam, you could walk around with your eyes closed, the internet GPS and a small camera accessory doing the work. If you still possessed most of your optic nerves, you were good to go.
Chase stopped in his tracks for a second.
“Hold on, Kyle. I just got a call from my dad on Flywire, said I need to check my email.”
“Set Red,” Chase said to his voice activated Holo desktop.
“G-Mail, Chasemaddog, red/7, Inbox, down, down, down…Open…”
“Well shit, Kyle, this is bad. Turns out something happened on the new Russ Bridges shoot. Tom Stallings is dead…”
“Our dads’ friend?”
“Yep. It gets worse. Russ Bridges has gone missing. Meanwhile, oh, shit. Mr. Finklestein is dead,too” Chase said.
“How?”
“Shot during a robbery in a parking lot in Los Angeles. He was visiting Mr. Naigles for some reason. And Mr. Naigles has gone missing as well. Dad says we have to get the hell home. This is an emergency. He said we have to go now. Even me! Damn! I have practice tomorrow! What the hell can he be thinking?”
“Maybe he just means me,” Kyle said.
“No this is weird, he means both of us. We’re supposed to go directly to my house. He even used code, damn he wants me to bust out the Smartlife system in my new car. This is bad, Kyle.”
They turned to move but the throng rushed the stage just as the thrash-hop music flooded the hall.
The screen came down and an elevated platform began extending out into the audience. Massive screens at the top of the hall came on, as did screens on the walls of the building.
“Might as well watch,” said Chase.
The young men put their headsets on.
Bubble ravers were obviously getting more of an experience with the capabilities of their systems.
“Jesus, what the hell is that?” Kyle yelled.
The images dove and dipped at the audience members. Though computer generated, they were so realistic and terrible one avoided them on instinct at first, until the sensation wore off.
Holo-images of flying beast dogs swirled in the mist around the form of the lead singer for Feathered Lizard, a white man in his forties with a long mane of white hair, pink eyes like a pig caught in a camera shot of those old flash bulbs. Were those scales on him? Did a fan of reptilian spines briefly jut from his back like the plates of a stegosaurus?
The beast dogs encircled themselves around the master’s feet on the stage. They licked their scaly lips and hissed at the audience.
Band members completed the ruse by stepping over them, around them as they played, as if the hellish images generated by a program were real. Quetzalcoatl was screaming froth into the microphone, growl-yelling, the words, in Yiddish, Welsh? Irish? What the hell were they?
The bubblers were flailing around as the music thundered. It seemed to come from everywhere, from the floor, from the bodies of their fellow concert goers.
“If they are getting more on their systems than we are Kyle, I can’t even imagine what it’s doing to them,” Chase said.
“Damn, dude, that can’t be healthy,” Kyle said.
There were at least three couples actually fornicating on the “dance floor” if it can be called that; rapt with lust-madness, their eyes rolled back into their skulls, drones of fornication, reptile dogs like those on the stage. Various mosh pits could be seen back from this epicenter of insanity, people beating each other, flailing, gnashing teeth, the pulling of hair.
Someone reached for Chase’s considerable black mane, where-upon Chase wheeled around and popped them with a quick jab, undoubtedly breaking a nose or a jaw.
The injured youth merely rose to his feet again like a zombie and pin-wheeled away, swept up in the music.
“God damn this is insane, Kyle…”
At once people were backing away from a man on his knees, something was in his hands, something dripping like gobs of blackberry jam. The man, bald, shirtless his back a mixture of muscles, Celtic and Aztec tattoos, was to Kyle and Chase. Everyone formed an aisle before the stage.
The man rose to his bare feet and approached the stage as the music reached a crescendo. He placed his offering at the feet of Quetzalcoatl feet which briefly sprang talons and claws like those seen at the base of some Aztec statue.
The man raised his blood-covered hands in tribute. Kyle knew better than to keep watching but, he couldn’t turn away. The man would turn around and reveal something…
“What the….?”
He turned to face Kyle and Chase.
“Dude! He ripped out his own fucking eyes, bro! That dude ripped out his own eyes and put them on the stage!” Chase said.
“To live inside, is to finally be free! To live inside, is to finally be free!” the man whispred directly at Kyle. How had a reptilian, sandpaper whisper reached Kyle’s ears above the din of the thrashing pumping music and chords.
He was dancing in perfect synch to the music, blood running in streams down his face from his empty eye sockets, onto his bare chest and obscuring his Celtic tattoos.
Kyle could see the dot on his forehead where the mini-cam was stitched into his skin.
“What the hell did he do?”
“I’ve heard about this, Kyle! I thought it was just an urban legend. They call it going inside!” Chase screamed.
“What?”
“He’s gone inside,” Chase said. “Totally dependant on the Bubble, committed to it for the rest of his life. Sacrifice to the Gods of rock, Feathered Lizard. Fucking sick, man…”
Kyle felt himself being hauled backwards by a massive hand.
The man with angry eyes before him looked Samoan. What had he done to offend this man?
“You and Mr. Malone have been given orders. You need to follow them, right away, Marine. Do you copy?”
“Copy,” Kyle said on a reflex.
“Then move out!”
“Who are you?”
“You’re Uncle Sean sent me. Now move!”
Minutes later they had left in Kyle’s 1977 Dodge Dart. The classic was a restored beauty.
“Why does Uncle Tim want all us kids to drive these old pieces of shit,” Chase said at last as they headed east toward the coast on 528.
“Hey, you didn’t know how to disable Smartlife on your ride!” Kyle said.
“They're making it harder to do that. You’ve got to get down near the engine anymore, as well as yank the crap out of the dash. Plus the GPS pinger they have in the back. It would have taken hours,” Chase said.
“This time next year, they’ll be mandatory; even in classics and antiques like this one,” Chase said.
“I heard that, too,” Kyle said.
“I wonder what all this is about.”
“Me too,” replied Kyle. But something had come alive in him after witnessing the horrific nightmare of the man and his vacant eye sockets. It was as though he had lived that moment in a dream before. And it had finally awakened him from a sleep, a nice dream he had been having.
Kyle knew in that instant, he wasn’t going into the Marines. The world was about the undergo changes the like of which none of them had seen.

*

Chapter 9 Mutually-Assured Destruction

2009-10-13T10:26:00.000-07:00

(Copyright David Anthony Kearns, all rights reserved, not for commercial republication but soley for reader entertainment. Attention reader, you are now enjoying The Big Lie, in real-time: this chapter was drafted over the last three days from the date and time of this post. Stay tuned to Twitter for update announcements. The draft of Book 2 of the Monster Hole Series will continue now, until completion, or mysterious demise of the author.)

Dec. 10, 2014 Fifteen miles off Astoria Park, Washington State - Russ Bridges sat on a surfboard in the channel between the massive walls of water exploding in shimmering shades of brown and green along the reef, and the boat that had brought them this far out to sea.
Dark Thunder was wrapping today. This would be the last day of shooting before they closed things down for the winter. They had been buzzed twice by helicopter but the banks of mist that came in from the deep pacific obscured the lettering. It must have been a local television crew. Their own helicopter hadn’t arrived today, for some reason, but that was alright; they were done with all those establishing shots; done with all shots really. Didn’t even need this footage today, but, it was swell; big enough to tow into and just small enough that Russ actually thought of paddling into it.
What the hell it was only about twenty to twenty five feet. He was up for it.
He sat in the morning fog appreciating the neon glow of the sunrise, watchingTom approach aboard the jet ski from channel.
Tom idled up to Russ and cut off the engine. The two of them sitting for a minute taking in the silence.
“You know I was thinking Ryan…” said Tom.
“…would be proud of us,” Russ said finishing his thought for him. “Especially you Tom. Funny how we were both thinking about him this morning.”
“Why would he be proud of me?” Tom asked.
“Hey, he would never have guessed you would do something like this; drop everything go riding giants with me and these guys. It’s been a blast man,” Russ said.
“You okay, Smoke?” Tom said, using the nickname from Melbourne Beach.
“Yeah, why?” Russ said.
“I don’t know. It’s not like you to be so melancholy.”
“I never knew I was being melancholy.”
“Okay, call it introspective. Something wrong?”
“Naw, but when you mentioned Ryan it was a little weird. You know these past few days it’s like I can feel him, right here next to me, like he’s trying to tell me something. But, no matter how loud he yells, I can’t seem to hear it. I wish I knew what the hell it was Tom,” Russ said.
“You remember what his brother told us, don’t you?”
“Yeah, that when we needed to, we’d hear him,” Russ said.
“Maybe you’re hearing a warning not to risk your neck on these waves. We’ve got all the tow-in sequences we need, Russ. No need for the director to get himself killed on the final day of filming,” Tom said.
“No, that’s not it, Tom. Look at these waves. It’s perfectly glassy. If only for the title sequence it would be a gas to have the director riding one of these, just like the young guns. Good publicity man, and I’ll be damned if I miss out on easy pickin's like these,” Russ said.
“Alright then, Hoss. Saddle up and we’ll pull you in,” Tom said. He keyed the ignition and moved forward, allowing the thick, red rope to play out on the smooth water. Russ grabbed the handle, placed his feet in the board straps, and after a second or two, was up and moving across the water.
Tom curved the ski off to the northwest and raised his right arm; the ready signal. Here was a likely set.
Russ could see that Tom had chosen the second wave in the set. The first would give Russ a chance to gauge shape, and height.
There was that helicopter again racing around to get their own shots of the spectacle so that the rising sun was hitting the subjects dead on. Whoever these bandits were, Russ thought, they had better not try to make any money with the images.
The rope went slack, then taught again as Tom turned and selected his line of attack for the best run.. Before curving away and heading to the channel, Russ would then decide how late he wanted to let go of the rope. If he was feeling lucky he could maximize the whip and try to take the whole wave backside, traveling under the falling lip and across to the opposing face. But he knew his limitations. If something happened to him, Tom wouldn’t be able to traverse a football field of whitewater with the ski in time to offer any help.
And yet, it looked make-able, causing him to hold onto the rope perhaps a millisecond longer than he should have.
Russ looked at Tommy just as he let go: he was going deep, but not all the way through. Tom smiled, as if to say “I wouldn’t go for it either.”
He cruised along at a nice speed for a second until his forward momentum played itself out, hopping and carving deeper toward the rising critical section, trying to feel the power of the wave behind him. The familiar sensation of dangerous steepness and blooming momentum, raised ripples of gooseflesh on his arms and shoulders.
The wave went critical so fast that he almost let it run right beneath him. He gasped and switched stance. All focus, all thought an energy was brought down to a very simple battle of wills between his animal sense of self-preservation, and the strategic part of his mind that calculated the best line to take in order to make it out alive
Russ leaned back to prevent himself from being pitch-poled forward. Time seemed to slow as he met the rushing wall of water, pushed off of it as though stepping out onto a cloud. He knew it had been a mistake to drop in this late and his life was in danger, but there was no turning back now. He was airborne, having accidentally launched himself off the wave’s lip with no more thought than a kid hitting the top of a skate-park ramp.
“I deny the accident of it,” wasn’t that what Jackson Pollack said of his drip art?
Russ relaxed and brought his right knee up a bit, as though completing an Ollie, and extended his left foot forward. He gently placed the board down into the steep hillside of water with a slapping hiss and continued to slide. That’s going to look good on film, he thought briefly. And indeed it had been no more difficult that a ramp trick done by a million skaters a day; only the stakes had been so much higher.
For an instant, it seemed, sound itself was shut out and all was blur, speed; every little defect in the shimmering surface of the wave became a vibration running up his shins to his knees. His velocity tripled in the next two seconds as he hunkered and prepared to push out a three-hundred pound squat on the bottom turn, all the while trying to keep a feather-light touch on the board‘s direction. The concussion of the curling lip exploding behind him was much louder than he expected, as was the burst of air from the tube, filled with sea spray and a wall of moving air.
Russ dug his legs in and pressed hard. In an instant his head felt like a hundred pounds of dead weight, given the G-force of the turn.
A thousand squats a day with three hundred pounds of free weights; bicep curls, neck curls, sit ups, push ups, submerging yourself in 55 degree water carrying a fifty pound chunk of concrete across a shallow cove for 100 yards. Surfacing and diving back down for it, however many times it took to get the job done, ten times in one workout; rain or shine, high tide or low. That’s what it took to put him here, for this ten-second ride on a giant.
Russ carved the first bottom turn and nearly ate it only catching himself with a reflexive slap of the right hand which dug deep into the cool blue.
In that second he fought to keep his footing, the wall had come up behind him again to scoop him up to the top of the crest. If he had missed the cutback he would have launched into the sky, then been mauled by the next wave which was a third larger than this one. But he didn’t. He swallowed hard as he fell from the top and entered a white-out of uncertainty, miraculously clearing the spray and the chop like a fighter pilot navigating out of a cloud of shrapnel.
Straight down again and curving hard, extending himself along the face, the wave grew easier to manage now. Russ leaned back to slow himself and locked his fear-monster in a closet. He didn’t know if death awaited, or glory, but the chance was worth it. He closed his eyes, backed inside the hollow barrel, then opened them again. The ceiling to this cave of moving water was nearly ten feet above him. For just a second he was nearly sucked into the vicious hydraulic. He trimmed his stance, leaned forward and offered up a split-second prayer.
Please don’t close out on me now.
No thought as he watched each section of the wave face’s grow more distant and covered up by the tube, the hole growing smaller.
Russ braced himself for a pounding, inhaled hard and waited for fate’s ruling.
The spit punched him in the back as he emerged into the sunshine again, bunny hopping, skip-slapping across the face and out of danger. Free like a child, his heart raged with joy. He dug his heel, swung his left arm for one more cutback. Something made him look to Tom sitting on the jet ski now, just fifty yards from him.
Tom raised his fist in the air in salute.
That had been a good one, Tom was thinking, one for the…
The explosion ripped the jet ski to pieces with a crackling thud, scattering hunks of flaming plastic, bone and flesh across the smooth waters of the Pacific in a cacophony of incidental fury.
Tom’s head, his arm, chest, torso, legs were ripped like exploding pieces of chicken.
Russ kept starring at that empty place where Tom had been. He kept looking for the familiar form of his friend to resolve but it wouldn’t. There was a dollop of foamy water with blood in it, and a slick of flaming gasoline.
The helicopter arched overhead then raced westward, toward the coast. It grew smaller and with each passing second, looked more guilty as it descended on the horizon.
Russ sank back down into the water as his wave played out, and with no one to offer the tow rope again, began paddling for the channel to avoid the ten foot wall of white water from the next, all the while looking back, not willing to believe what he had just seen.
He watched in horror as the white-water erased all evidence of Tom or the watercraft he had been riding.
The film crew knifed the boat around toward him as Russ screamed his lungs hoarse: one word “Tom!” over and over.

*
“Tim! Tom’s been killed,” Russ said over the landline.
He was on a rainy wharf yelling into a battered pay phone. He foot-bailed on his crew with only his jeans, his jacket and his pocket contents after reaching the docks. They, those whoever, would be looking for him. Not only that he didn’t know if someone within the film, or the boat crew, had placed the explosives in the ski.
The air was getting cold, a storm was coming.
“You should have used a secure line, Russ.”
“Is that all you can say?” Russ heard himself spit. The words echoed off the plastic walls of the phone booth. He had called the Highjump outlet in Delonega Georgia, and as expected, right according to plan, Tim had been there.
“Russ calm down! Since the cat is out of the bag, go ahead and tell me what happened.”
“We were wrapping up this morning. Didn’t even need the footage. I had been on the jet ski since dawn. I thought it was calm enough to ride one. So, Tommy offered to tow me in. It’s like only the third time he’s towed someone in, mostly he drives the boat.
“So I rode the wave, everything goes well and then bam; the ski exploded. And there was this helicopter buzzing us all morning Tim. I think they were trying to kill me, not Tom!”
“Easy Russ, what did the Coast Guard say?”
“All they could do was take out statements, Tim! There isn’t enough of him left to…and there was nothing left of the ski! They…that reef is full of sharks man.”
“Okay, look, we were expecting someone to get rough and they have, Russ. Where are you?”
“I’d rather not say. I…”
“Can you get to shayla?” Tim asked indicating the code word, for Safe House Los Angeles.”
“I’ve got $300 cash on me buddy.”
“Don’t….” Tim started but Russ was already on his page. ‘Don’t use ATM, don’t use credit. Use cash. Russ was already plotting out where to get a razor, and a dog groomer. His hair needed to go, as did his moustache and beard. He needed to “get cubed” and fast.
“This is totally fuckin’ crook, Tim. Tommy’s dead, man. They killed Tom!”
“Russ, focus. You need to stick to the alpha plan. I am sorry about Tom but we have to get moving now. Things are happening! And fast”
“What things?”
“I’ll let them explain it to you,” Tim said.

*
Russ slept for nearly two days in the apartment in the Los Felix neighborhood.
Dave Finklestein and Chuck Naigles showed up on day three.
Dave parked his rental van in the lot at the observatory and walked down the hill. Chuck forgot about protocol and drove his BMW right up to the front door of the apartment complex.
But he had at least disabled his Smartlife System so it couldn’t tell his home and office where he was.
“Woah, Yule Brenner!” Dave said before he could stop himself.
“What took you guys so long to get here?” Russ asked opening the door. He was disheveled, unshaven, a three day beard coming back in to replace the luxurious cave man special he had sported during the filming. He had obviously made use of the booze cabinet and a little bit of reefer he had requested to be stashed there.
By the look in his eyes, Chuck supposed Russ had endured a full-on X-Box and anxiety marathon.
“Tim was being watched. He couldn’t send us straight away, Russ,” said Dave. “I only heard about all this last night. I am so sorry. I know you and Tom were close.”
They each hugged him, but he was loose like a rag. No heart left in him.
Russ plopped on the couch. He dug into the remainders on the coffee table to pack himself a bong hit, proffering it to them both in an absurd gesture to hospitality that he knew from experience, neither of them would take him up on.
“Same ole Smokey,” said Dave with a sad smile.
“I saw in Variety how the Coast Guard closed the investigation. But they still need to talk with you,” said Chuck. “Shouldn’t you call them?”
“Tim left word on Twitter not to. They’ll want me to come in, give the statement and when I do, I’ll expose myself. Then, whoever will simply finish the job. They were after me, Chuck, not Tom. I just have this feeling, don’t ask me how I know, I just know. For some reason, they need me dead first,” he said.
“Funny you should say that,” Chuck said.
“Why you, now?” Dave asked.
“ Maybe they don’t like surf movies,” Russ said, exhaling the weed smoke.
“You sure this isn’t about that stuff in Costa Rica?” Dave asked.
“Naw, man. That’s ancient history, and I didn’t even know enough to rat on anybody. I just got the hell out of there with Simone and our money. If those people had wanted to kill me, they could have done it while I was in Belize, or four years ago at Ryan‘s funeral in Mel Beach. I was majorly exposed there. No, this is about the thing, the group, what we know. It goes back to Ryan, to what we learned at the funeral, all this stuff we‘re working on.”
“So..?” Chuck asked.
“They’ll get all of us, one by one. Everyone who knew Ryan. U.S. Senator or not, even Sean isn’t safe. Somebody should let Jay and Gary know, if Tim hasn‘t already thought of it.”
Chuck exhaled.
“What’s the matter Chuck?” Russ asked.
“Just seems weird. You’re the only movie director I know, and I mean really know well, and….”
“And…? No use holding back on the wild theories, Chuck. Spill it,” Russ said.
“Four days ago, I got a call from someone who I worked with on some investigations.”
“I thought you were an attorney, Chuck. Not an investigator,” Russ said.
“Buddy in this town everyone’s investigating everyone else. Just a fact of the game,” Chuck said.
“And, what happened?”
“This is shit I could get disbarred for, for sure. But I was about to ask you for your help looking at some of the stuff this, uh, business associate has,” he said.
“This associate you helped in an investigation into something that could get you disbarred?” Chuck said.
“Right. If Tom’s death is related to the thing, then, they’ve anticipated our next move and tried to prevent you from helping me. Maybe that’s why they came at you first,” he said.
“To prevent me from hooking up with you, now? That’s way paranoid, dude. You’re spending too much time with Tim.”
“Am I? Or are you not spending enough? You forget what’s a stake here, Russ. Some of us have been hauling the sled while others have been off making movies.”
“Well hell, at least we‘ve scotched that for now. And what this associate has to say, is related to the thing?” Russ asked.
“Oh hell yeah it is,” Chuck said.
“Who does that sound like?” Dave said. “Doesn’t sound half crazy if you know what these people are capable of.”
“Chuck you’re saying that they, and by them I mean both the Air Force and our other friends, are infiltrating Hollywood? Movie making?”
Chuck rubbed a hand over his tightly trimmed afro and leaned back in the sofa. He threw up his arms is if to say ‘That’s right Smokey, believe it, don’t…whatever.”
It took a second for anyone to react.
“Makes perfect sense, when you think about it,” Dave said. “You wouldn’t want to just control politics and economics, would you? In order to do the former two, you’d have to control thought itself. What better method than the movies. Likely been at this for decades.”
“What is it exactly this guy wanted to show you?” Russ asked.
“Have you heard of Sundown Studios, Russ?”
“Yeah, well-connected CGI firm over in Venice Beach. They do all the work for those Savante commercials for their neural desktop and the network.”
“Well this guy I know, he’s had several run-ins with them. I want you to listen to what he has to say,” Chuck said.
“You don’t think he’s on the level?”
“Yeah, I do, but what he’s saying is so out of whack, I want someone else’s eyes and ears on it. I thought of you first…because. Besides Ryan, you’re the only one in our crowd who has had some experience with the intelligence community. You’ll know whether what he‘s saying is for real or not,” Chuck said.
“Okay, I’ll chat with him. What the heck,” he said.

*
Chuck, Dave and Russ sat at the diner off I-10 with Evan Katzenberg. It was like a surreal nightmare to Russ; a personal idol, meeting him here in a Denny’s near I-10. If only he could call Tom after this little sit-down.
“Dude, you’ll never guess who I had lunch with…”
“No fuckin way!”
“Way! Way, way!”
Katzenberg kept the brim of his Laker’s cap pulled down over his sunglasses even while crammed in the corner of the darkened booth where not even the wait staff could get a good look at him. Russ had heard the stories about how the famous director had become more paranoid and security conscious, lately. He was about to find out why.
“This guy is stoned,” Evan said right away. “I can smell it on him.”
“My friend was just murdered, Mr. Katzenberg,” Russ said extending his hand. “You’ll have to excuse me. By the way, I am a huge fan of your work,” Russ managed.
“He’s cool?” Katzenberg asked, darting his eyes toward Dave.
“Evan, he’s cool too. This is Mr. Finklestein. He’s a financial advisor to our outfit. Just lay it all out for them, like you did for me two days ago.”
“You know I don’t mind telling you that I am risking a lot here, Chuck. I hope you can appreciate that,” he said.
“Evan, with all due respect, I put my ass on the line for you as well, didn’t I?”
Russ stifled a nervous laugh. After all here was Evan Katzenberg! And here the director was acting like a twitch in a crime drama that he might have written and directed. The real man was paranoid, afraid like the rest of us, Russ thought.
Evan Katzenberg looked at Russ; “Just what the hell are we smiling at, jackass!?”
“Look Mr. Katzenberg no offense, I’m just a little star-struck. This is like, surreal to me…”
“Yeah? Well get over it already, time is wasting. I‘ve got my yard guy driving around in my $90,000 Porsche so fucking Smartlife can‘t track me here. I‘m driving his POS F-150. I‘m lucky, he only steals the thing and doesn‘t also rob a bank with it,” Evan said.
“Evan let’s just start at the beginning,” Chuck said.
“Alright, two years ago, I finished Crossfire, and we’re in the editing stage and somehow, someone gets an advance copy even before we were done. And even before the movie comes out I’m getting blasted from all sides.”
“I remember that. They said the ending was…” Dave said.
“Too sympathetic to the Palestinian viewpoint. Right.”
“I didn’t think so,” Dave said. “I mean, speaking as a Jew myself…I”
Everyone else at the table was looking at him.
Dave waved his hands over his head; “sorry, go on.”
“Then these people approached me, claimed to be from some Christian group, demanded I change the thing; said I was giving up on Israel, giving up on my own people. I mean, these assholes did everything but call me a freakin’ holocaust denier staged rallies for the news cameras. And my grandparents survived the camps!”
“You needed something to make it all go away,” Dave said.
“He’s a smart one, he is. Yes, in a town where power is the objective, information is the currency. I needed the chief agitator, this ass clown of a plastic surgeon cum pastor, neutralized,” he said.
“So..?”
“So, I started looking into it. I find out half the bullshit in this town, the political trouble, including the theft of an uncut version of Crossfire can be traced back to these pieces of shit over there at Sundown Studios, who, the ass clown had done contract work for,” he said.
“Okay, with all due respect, Mr. Katzenberg…”
“Knowing the connection between Sundown and this surgeon, I refused to work with them on Metamorphosis but the big boys at RM are demanding it. So Chuck here knows this guy who does this thing, see? These jobs, he can…”
“He’s a fixer,” Chuck said. “He investigates. I don’t have official knowledge as to what he found out.”
“It was bad,” said Evan. “We had this guy. Oh was it bad. The wife…”
“All besides the point,” Chuck said.
“Right. So we tell him to at least back off on the protest thing which goes away. He does, but, what he gives up in trade for us shutting up about his personal life is the following. Back in the 2009 remember when they caught Leon Jimenez, down in Juarez?”
“Yeah, head finance guy for the Mexican mafia!” said Dave.
“Well, remember how he disappeared?”
“Witness protection,” Russ said.
“Right, and I’m getting to that. It seems that Sundown Studios turned Leon Jimenez into none other, than Carlos Mercado, and they used the surgeon to help them do it,” he said.
“Of Smartlife Systems, the Gregorio platform, the Neural Network. The inventor of Bubbling?” Russ asked.
“None other! Plastic surgery, video clips of him growing up in Santa Clara, Cuba. Still shots of his, pictures of his relatives you see in the newspapers? All faked by Sundown Studios.”
“Whoa,” Russ said. But the director was ahead of him.
“Yeah, tell me about it. Sounds crazy, right?”
Katzenberg took out a file and began laying down photographs.
“If you look at the pictures of his mother you ever notice, she’s always wearing the same dress? In all their brochures. You mean to tell me that hag was wearing the same dress the day the boy was born, as she was the day he jumped the wharf at Havana Harbor? Which is somehow the same damned dress and hairstyle she’s wearing in Miami when she got off the plane? Hell I know it was bad over there, but the same damned dress for twenty five years?”
“Who is she?”
“The girl in this photo is an actress named Yolanda Ramirez. Her resume listed some bit-work for the X-Box and walk-on stuff she did for CGI product over at Sundown Studio. It drove me nuts looking at these pictures because I knew I had seen that face before. I never forget a face. I might not place the name but a face, I never forget.”
“She nearly got the lead female role in Metamorphosis! She really nailed that audition. I went back and found her tapes.”
“She’s good?”
“She’s fucking dead, is what! Drove off the PCH when I started asking questions about all this stuff. Kicker is, as far as anyone knew her can tell, she didn’t even own a car, and never had a California driver’s license.”
“How did she get around?”
“Who knows with these kids. Half of them have too many DUIs, they use the buses, taxis, bicycles, whatever. She lived in a crappy little apartment off the Wilshire with another girl. She dies in a souped-up 2013 Mazda convertible that LAPD can‘t find an owner for. If it was me missing that automobile? I‘d file a report. Nothing on record. No VIN. Tell me I‘m crazy.”
Russ went to ask a question but Katzenberg wasn’t finished.
“How does a shitty little CGI outfit in Venice Beach become so big in the space of ten years with no major motion credits, nothing but some video game work? I mean what have they done in the last ten years? Why does someone at every party in town know who they are if they haven’t done any meaningful work? How come they’re such big hot-shots they can tell a major studio they have to be put on my picture, and all they have to show for themselves is that shitty little warehouse of a studio out in Venice Beach?”
“Yeah, okay. You got me. You’ve looked into it?” Russ asked.
“This is what they’ve really been up to for the last ten years,. They were paid quite well. This is also where you guys apparently come in. This shit is well beyond me,” he said.
Katzenberg opened the dossier again and placed the photos and screen captures from YouTube down on the table.
“What do you think?” he said.
“Looks pretty real,” Russ said. “But, obviously these palm trees over here are clones of each other.”
“This guy is good. You’ve spent time looking at film, my friend,” Katzenberg said.
“I remember these shots,” Dave marveled.
“That’s familiar,” Russ said pointing to the alleged UFO in the picture.
“Yeah, it’s the top of a light pole over at Disney. See? This is what they do! They fake it, but they leave in these easy little details, only you have to hunt for them like those old Where’s Waldo things you looked at as a kid, remember those?” he said.
“Then we have this,” Katzenberg said.
“What the hell is that? This is fake?”
“No the word I am getting is, this is the real deal. Sundown Studios are supposed to use this as a mock-up for about a hundred different critters they will put into a dozen different major motion pictures they suddenly got contracts to work on.”
Russ whistled and said; “art imitates life.”
“Right, I get you Russ. Art imitates life, to make life seem…”
“Less real…” said Dave.
“So, I’m not crazy,” Evan sighed with relief.
“They are even going to use one in my movie. I have been told in no uncertain terms that I am supposed to write this or something like this into our story. Can you imagine? How the fuck am I supposed to write this son-of-a-bitch into a love story set in the future? This has nothing, I repeat, nothing to do with what I am working on! I mean, first of all, WHAT the fuck is it? Let‘s start there, please.”
“Where was this taken?”
“Coleman Texas. The word is, this thing chewed up a farmer pretty good.”
“Where would something like this come from?” Dave asked.
“Remember that story Ryan told Tim; that programming detail he was working on for Camerdyne? The creatures they were making in a lab somewhere?” Chuck said.
“Perfect, Camerdyne. Yes, now we come to the piece de resistance,” Katzenberg said.
“Better than this?” Russ asked.
“One last piece of information then I am out of this,” he said.
The document seemed to be an internal memo between the U.S. Air Force and Camerdyne Systems, Inc. releasing Leon Jimenez into the protective custody of the company’s private security forces.
“This establishes a connection between Camerdyne, and Leon Jimenez, alias Carlos Mercado, of Savante Systems, Inc.” Evan said.
“We’ve got to go to the press with this,” said Russ.
“No, not yet,” Dave said. “We need to run this by Tim and ….”
“Yes, well…” Chuck said. “Look Evan I can’t thank you enough for this,” he added.
“Whatever you do, you’ve got to keep me out of this. The funny thing is, the plastic surgeon warned me, I wouldn’t be able to keep this under my hat. I can keep him in the clear for a while, but he said, in the end when this gets out, people will die. If you believe our guy, he and I will be first,” Evan said.
“Look, we can protect you, we have a secure network,” Dave said.
“Just wait a while before you got to the press. I don’t need no network to protect me. What I need to do is finish making my movie, even if I had to add this damned devil dog into the script somewhere,” he said.
“You can’t get out of that?” Russ asked. “Even with what you know?”
“It’s a long story. Suffice it to say, someone else has something on me. My friends, we live in a world of mutually-assured destruction, and there’s very little we can do about it,” he said.

Chapter 8 Walking My Neanderthal

2009-10-06T05:58:00.000-07:00

(Copyright David Anthony Kearns. All rights reserved. Not for commercial republication in any form.)

Dec. 13, 2014 Newnan, Georgia - Awbrey Strothers crossed his legs on the coffee table watching the dregs of a CNN report. He hissed like a snake on the inhale, and then let the pot smoke pop out of his mouth in pleasant little O rings that followed each other toward the breeze coming from the screen door.
This is fuckin’ juvenile, he thought. I can’t believe I’m doing this.
The weed was his cousin Donny’s, left in a little baggie on the table. This was Donny’s house, in fact, in Newnan, Georgia. The dwelling was a long, singlewide that was stilted on the down-slope of a modest declivity surrounded by skinny pines and brown, soggy needles, way out in the middle of Bum Fuck Egypt.
Donny was a lawn guy, and he wasn’t here just now. Good thing. Donny, also, didn’t lock up, never did anymore. It was the sort of lapse that was so very Donny in nature: Donny-logic. See if he locked up, he’d have to remember his keys when he returned from his Donny-doings, and he might not remember, to remember the keys, on said doings, and he would get pissed and bust things.
Donny routinely started his yellow Ford F-150 with a screwdriver he had jammed into the ignition when the convolution of the keys – losing, finding, making new ones over at Wal-Mart and the losing those - had reverberated so much, one day in a rage he just ripped the bolt tumbler out and sort of jury rigged it. It was also, so very Donny of him.
Hard to believe Donny was not only kin to Awbrey, but represented the state-of- the-art in the human species. Hell, Donny was thriving! Had him a business; had him a nice girlfriend who didn’t mind him having to spend so much on child support; had him a hot-tub on the back porch. Even had him a little Shetland sheep collie in that little doghouse beneath the rabbit hutch that never once tried to run away on him, likely out of pure terror.
And then ladies and gentlemen, we have X, thought Awbrey.
X was out sitting on the hood of Awbrey’s mindnight blue Chevelle Malibu, circa 1971, mint condition. Yes, with the white racing stripes and the Bridgestone with raised white letters.
And why did X insist on doing that? Well, owing to the peculiarities of all that is X, he was presently sniffing the air; said he could pick up ‘man-sign’ that way like a bloodhound.
“X, get off the damned car and get in here. You’ll scare folks who drive by!” Awbrey hollered through the screen door.
“Ain’t nobody coming,” X said in his nasal, high-pitched whine. Liked to make dogs seek cover the way he sort of yowled everything, thought Awbrey. Sounded like a little girl crying in homeroom when she discovers her menstruation.
It was amazing how fast X had picked up southern vernacular in the space of a few days. Had all the inflections, and the drawl just right.
“Cash Cab reruns on?” X whined.
“No, Cash Cab ain’t on, X,” Awbrey said.
“Damn, I like that show,” X said.
Satisfied for the moment that man-sign content of the air particles was minimal, apart from that coming from Awbrey, X rolled off the hood, wandered in and wiped his bare feet on the welcome mat, then padded instinctively into the kitchen. It was sad the way his jeans hung down in bunches near those spastically articulated toes of his but he just wasn’t built like your standard man. Top half of him was sort of regular, but the legs were bent, and sized at about half scale.
“This place got any beer,” he asked, checking the fridge. “Yes! Touchdown!”
“Hell, son, they about turned you into an alckie down there didn’t they,” Awbrey said.
“So what if they did,” X said, and that was precisely the same sort of thing Donny would say, in that same defeated, downbeat tone, although an octave lower.
See, that was another weird thing about X; he somehow picked up on the psychic vibrations of a place, right from the get go, like he could feel the presence of anyone who had ever been there. Mostly it was just Donny in this room, so X had just channeled him without even knowing.
X - you had to hand it to him. The guy was a hoot to have around. Funnier ‘n hell, if you took away the circumstances, thought Awbrey.
“Didn’t we just shave your feet this morning,” Awbrey said trying not to offend. X was also very sensitive.
X sat on the couch, and slurped his Budweiser ignoring the jibe for now.
“CNN’s for shit anymore. It’s six o’clock, why not turn on CNBC?” X said.
“It’s not like you got any investments, man, do you?” Awbrey said.
X ignored that jibe too. “Gimme a hit of that. You’re obviously a mean-assed stoner who’s had way too much.”
“They give you pot in there, too?” Awbrey asked.
“There’s a lot you don’t know, about me. A lot,” X said taking the roach and toking it like a pro. Unfortunately this ruse had its limitations. X possessed virgin lungs. He exploded in a coughing jag ending in a teary-eyed gasp.
“Yep, that’s just how they do it in the movies, X. You did everything right, right up to the point where you couldn’t hold it in.”
X smiled. For some reason that was funny.
“No Y-fi in here either I suppose,” X said, and now in pot-speak, he sounded like a kid on helium.
“Donny ain’t exactly a high tech sort of guy, X. Sorry. No Y-Fi, no Tivo, no Smartlife” Awbrey said with a big grin which broke into a chuckle followed by a cough.
“What’s funny?”
“Donny and Smartlife; the thought thereof. Do the math.”
“Ain’t a genius, is he,” X said.
“Who do you have to G-mail anyway?”
“Nunyo..”
“Nunyo Damn Bidness?”
“Precisely the fellow,” X said toking again.
“Careful X. It’s creeper. It Creeps up on you like man-sign.”
X watched a lot of movies. Since his cloning, this was practically the only activity he had been permitted, apart from reading and indoor soccer in the company gymnasium.
They cordoned off the gym, only top brass of the contractor Camerdyne Systems Inc., and Air Force personnel who had been cleared, would get to watch the games. X took them on three and four at a time, and always won. What a reality show you could make, thought Awbrey: indoor soccer with a cave man.
They wouldn’t let him build a skateboard ramp. He had no use for basketball, hated it. He was built too low to the ground for that. But give him an indoor soccer ball and a couple of goals and he ruled that thing.
X got a lot of what he said piped in to him from a local cable television station.
Georgia cable was different from Florida cable, but he knew the basics of all American dialects and even a little Spanish by now. He said television had a suicidal effect on him but, the meds helped him sort it all out and keep his perspective; his X-y bead on things, as it were.
He also wanted this agreed upon right up front, that he looked nothing like the guys in the old Geico commercials, when in fact, he did, only a little shorter, and with a longer nose, and a barrel chest, and these ears that kind of, peeked out at you from the sides of his head. There was also the smell, Le ode du Ex, to consider, which Awbrey never mentioned.
Even the name X came from popular culture, during just another boring-ass day answering questions, taking tests and watching movies, when he had done with the tests in about half the time it took for the smartest homo sapiens to complete them.
X.
And when they had given him all of it, everything they knew about him and where he came from, the whole story start to finish he listened quietly, politely and said “Okay, I’ll call myself X. “
And they said; “that’s crazy. Why?”
And he said; “I was inspired in the way Malcolm X chose his last name to represent the unknown variable, the slave name that no longer exists”
And then they said, “You can’t do that.”
And he said; “The fuck I can’t! My name is Xavier. X for short.”
And they couldn’t argue so they said “ok.”
And they found out his mind was like a ravenous beast. He devoured the internet and all its many applications from porn to tweet, in a number of days as though no more difficult to swallow than a sloppy pile of whipped potatoes. Thank you can I have more?
X got bored fooling with that until he discovered online trading. He made calls for some of the guys at the Camerdyne plant, then bam, the hero was given indulgencies, like Budweiser. Then he discovered sports betting, and bam again - he damned near had groupies on staff working for him. They were practically naming buildings after him.
You need anything X? Anything we can get you?
At one point a hooker had even been bribed with a whole shit-load of money, and given a blindfold. It was whispered that X wasn’t too keen on bestiality at first, but he sampled the merchandise all the same. Nothing else to do; the reverse on the whole Planet of the Apes deal. And yes, Awbrey and X even talked about that movie during one of their many recent sessions.
“Chuck Heston must have been gay, dude. I saw that movie! He should have gone after that female?”
“You mean Mrs. Cornelius?” Awbrey had winced.
“She was fine!” X said with a laugh. “But the rubber teeth would have gotten in the way!”
X what a goof.
Again, this all would be humorous were it not for the reason he had been cloned in the first place, and why it was kept so secret.
“So Unc!” X said suddenly.
And yeah, they had bonded so well, he thought of Awbrey as his uncle, a crazy uncle, at that.
“What X?”
“Explain me this Christianity business again, as you see it.”
“Dude, I am way too tired and too stoned now for that conversation. We have to make a plan. We ain’t got time…”
“But you always mention it in your books!”
“Which ones have you actually read, and I mean, all the way through, X?”
“Well, I thought the character of Priscilla in White Lion of Stone Mountain was somewhat two-dimensional,” he quipped.
“Nice try, ace. The books, not Kirkus review off the web,” Awbrey said.
“Alright, I haven’t read any of them,” X said.
“You read just about everything else in there, why not me?”
“They wouldn’t let me. They knew you and I would meet,” he said.
“No shit,” Awbrey said to this. This fact, if true, was amazing; it was a window on the convoluted rationalizations, the tweaked and perverted reasoning of the contractor/government cabal.
“They really said you can’t read my books just because we were going to meet?”
“Honest engine. Thought it would screw something up,” he said.
“Well, we screwed up anyway, didn’t we?”
“Sure did,” X said as the commercial came on.
“And that stuff really happened?” X asked.
“What?”
“You know, the Civil War and all that,” X asked.
X did this every now and again. He needed confirmation to decipher was actual history, and what was bullshit handed him by geneticists and anthropologists at the company. He knew that somewhere along the line, a great big chunk of it would wildly diverge, he just hadn’t found out what part of history was bullshit yet. Maybe all of it was.
“Hell yeah, it happened,” Awbrey said turning to look into the boy’s eyes. He wanted him to know it was true, real truth, true-true, no bullshit and he didn’t want to be tormented with a bunch of “really?’s”.
X just shook his head; “and they knew that blacks were human beings and they wanted to keep slavery going?”
“Fuckin’ A they did,” Awbrey said.
“It just don’t make sense, Unc.”
“Tell me about it. We are a fucked up species, my friend.”
“I’ll say…”
“Look,” Awbrey said tossing the Nerf football into a laundry basket by the television. “We can’t stay here too long, X. Donny’ll be home and he ain’t put together too well, mentally. He’ll have some kind of conniption fit if he lays eyes on you. This was quick little place to recharge but we need to beat feet.”
“Man-sign?”
“Yeah, man-sign, big-time! I’m surprised we haven’t seen anything on CNN,” Awbrey said.
“Unc, think about it, what would they say? What would they tell reporters? I mean, look at me!”
“You got a point, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t out there looking,” Awbrey said.
After they had taken their respective leaks and checked for shedding on the floor, they shuffled out to the Malibu.
“Wear the hat!” Awbrey said as they jumped in.
“I hate the hat,” X said to this, but put it on just the same, a nice red and white Braves rally cap.
Nothing wrong here officer, just an extremely ugly hobo down on his luck being given a lift; a gnome with a Braves cap on. Nothing out of the ordinary and sundry.
“I can hear, Unc. It hurts sometimes what you think.”
“Sorry, man,” said Awbrey.

*

“You realize of course, we have to get rid of this car, Unc.” He said this somewhere south of the Georgia - North Carolina line.
“Awe, man we can’t get rid of The Bird! What would make you say such a heinous thing?” Awbrey said.
“Sat coverage on the east coast is good, down to the half hour, something flies over, takes a picture, every twenty-nine minutes at least. That’s a conservative guess,” X said. He was a wealth of information.
“How did you know how to disable the tracking device?” Awbrey asked.
X was almost asleep when he answered; “It was in your Smartlife System. GPS tracks you. You don’t realize how many little unanswered emails are being sent and received with that thing. One to your home, one to them, all through your ISP, one from your home to them when you start to move. The whole thing had to go, man. Simple. I ripped the whole thing out. But, they got sats and they have a vector,” he said.
“A vector?”
“We’d be trapped on a peninsula called Florida. Had to head north. Makes sense. You weren’t going to try to get me a fake passport were you, leave on a cruise ship out of Miami or Canaveral? I get a big picture of that happening, and so do they. Had to be north. Then it’s just a question of routes. I-95, I-75 corridors. I’m actually surprised we made it this far in this damned thing. Racing stripes, who does that anymore?”
“Hey turd brain, this is a classic automobile,” Awbrey said.
“Classic red-neck mobile, you mean,” X said to this.
“Fuckin-A right, buddy!”
“Think Unc. If we’re going to make it all the way to D.C. we have to have a less conspicuous ride and you know it,” X said.
And he was right. Awbrey just hadn’t figured out a way to swap out yet that made any sense.
“So, explain to me how they approached you again,” X said.
“Two years ago, nearly to the day, I’m on my lonesome in my big ole house in Dalonega. And Carol…”
“That’s your wife,” X said.
“Ex-wife, yeah. Carol has gone. I’m suffering a wicked case of writer’s block..”
“This was after Purple Mountain was published?”
“Right, but I hadn’t written a damn thing in nearly a year. My agent calls me out of the blue and said a government contractor wants to offer me a million dollars to work for them, for a year,” he said.
“This was Camerdyne,” X said.
“No, they used a cut-out at first, and by now you know, Camerdyne is a cut-out for NSA or DARPA or someone like that, working through the Air Force,” Awbrey said.
“Cut outs, for cut-outs, for road-signs for bill-boards…” X said.
“Guy behind the guy, kinda shit. A Chinese puzzle with no end,” Awbrey said.
“Alright, why you?” X asked.
“I got my degree in history and anthropology from GSU. I’m an award-winning southern writer, and a Pulitzer candidate,” Awbrey said.
“Yeah but why you?”
“They said it had something to do with my theories on military strategy. Then they said it had to do with my theories on quantum phenomena and the occult, in which, my background is pretty extensive,” Awbrey said.
“But you don’t believe that,” X said.
“I’m wondering now, if maybe project BACKROADS was just looking for another Oswald,” Awbrey answered.
“You aren’t looking to kill the president, are you?”
“No but I am driving around with a cave man in my car,” Awbrey said.
“Cave boy, you mean. I’m thirteen. And Unc, as you know, cave men, as they are called in the parlance, are actually homo sapiens, although I’m not so sure about the sapiens end of the Latin. I think Linneaus got that part wrong. I am a proud member of the homo neanderthal branch of the human family tree,” he said.
“Right..”
“And what would they need a patsy for anyway?”
“I haven’t figured that out yet but it did seem awful easy to get your sorry ass out of that facility,” Awbrey said.
“ I think that is just your rabid paranoia at work again heightened by the recent use of a control substance. You need to take your medicine. It was like you said. You wanted to show me a real soccer field. They trusted you,” X said.
“So, did they tell you how they did it?” Awbrey asked.
“The cloning? Yeah, most of it. They were able to isolate DNA from a sample somewhere, somehow. They evacuated the nucleus of a gorilla embryo, injected my DNA. I was gestated inside a gorilla mother, and I came to term. Dolly the sheep primate style,” he said.
“What I can’t figure out is where they got Neander DNA,” X said.
“I know,” Awbrey said. “Your DNA was found inside vacuum frozen glass tubes in a sealed titanium vault, inside a cave. And that cave was found beneath a half a mile of ice in Antarctica,” Awbrey said.
“Well, that certainly would rewrite some history books,” X said.
“Science books, religious texts, all of it. You name it,” Awbrey added.
“What is BACKROADS?” X said.
“Top Secret government project to come up with a scenario for a hostile takeover of all we hold dear, free market capitalism, society etc. etc. etc.”
“So..?”
“They asked me to brainstorm it using everything I knew and I came to the conclusion that a web attack with viruses would be a starting point and I illustrated how,” Awbrey said.
“And..?”
“They said ‘think bigger we got that covered’ So back I marched out there into the world of research and I said, likely the Chinese or other communist block countries would side with a destructive element of the Jihadi movements, meanwhile a socialist block would be created consisting of Cuba, Venezuela and other Latin nations. Street gangs and the Jihadis would find common interest in our demise as a society. Look for demonstrations so forth escalating in the US and US-backed Latin nations and their connections with the Chinese.
“Then it occurred to me that all this economic activity with China was just a ruse. That they opened their capital markets to us with the deliberate intention of attempting to crash the stock markets and all world markets at a later date, when all of this unrest was taking place,” Awbrey said.
“Does it hurt being you? What did they say?”
“They said ‘hell we know all about that already, think bigger!’”
“And then?”
“Then things got weird,” Awbrey said.
“Then we met,” X said with a laugh.
“No, not yet. First they showed me a film about Hernando Cortez and I had already done some research on him, how he conquered Mexico. Then they brought an Air Force guy in to speak with me. I wasn’t supposed to look into his eyes or address him by name. I think he was Air Force anyway. He went by the name of Glen.”
“Glen?”
“Just Glen”
“What was his deal?”
“Somehow they had a discarded pill bottle from my trash and I hadn’t admitted during my polygraphs that I took anti-depressants. He said it was a federal crime and I was to be given new polygraphs later. But then he said to me ‘Mr. Strothers, what would happen to you if you stopped taking this for a week?’ and I said; ‘Hell I’d probably nut out’”
“What did he say?”
“Aw, he just nodded, then in marched another guy with a brief case full of different meds, pain pills, dick-straighteners, downers for the spastic, sero-pops for the schitzos, all kinds of shit that was prescription. And then he says, ‘Mr. Strothers what would happen to society, if all the sudden, all this crap wasn’t available on the open market?’ and I said ‘Hell, we’d all probably nut out’”
“What did Glen say to this?”
“He said ‘Mr Strothers, do you see where we are going with this?’ and I said, ‘No, not exactly’ and he said, ‘we hired you to bring yourself up to speed and you’ve done that. But we didn’t hire you for your prowess as a computer wiz or as a military strategist. We have people who can do that. We hired you for your ability to think laterally and in four dimensions, as exemplified in your background, and your ability at structure in novel writing.’”
“Nice compliment,” X said. “Then what?”
“He says, ‘I give you a week to think on it, on top of which, ask yourself what would happen if all the world, were suddenly controlled by one central authority?’”
“Then what?”
“I come back in and I am utterly clueless so, they gave me a clue,” Awbrey said.
“In walks an archeologist, nice looking dame, but all business. She takes out some artifacts, bones carved with handles used for fire making, spear heads, a piece of wood obviously used for sowing seeds,” Awbrey said.
“So?”
“Well the funny thing about them is, they were are per-mineralized, you know? Petrified. They had been in the earth more than half a million years and they had turned to stone. Wasn’t supposed to be. She says, ‘these were uncovered in the desert in New Mexico,’” Awbrey said with an exhale. X could tell this part made him nervous.
“And?”
“Homeboy, sapiens didn’t fully genetically evolve until 60,000 years ago, the Human Genome project pretty much proved it. So, it’s likely these were tools your folks had made, X, and there was more. It turns out there was much more,” Awbrey said.
“Huh,” X said casually.
“Same Air Force guy comes back in and says, ‘here I want you to read this,’ hands me a Bible. ‘Focus on the book of revelations and tell me why you think it’s in there,’” then he walks out.
“Well that shit about blew my mind when I started thinking about it.”
“What conclusion did you come to?”
“That all this shit has happened before. By the way, you’re living proof,” Awbrey said as the turned off a dirt road in rural North Carolina.

#
They purchased a nearly ancient 1977 Chevy Nova from a used-car dealership outside of Cherokee North Carolina.
The bird was left as part of the trade. Awbrey asked the guy to either paint The Bird, or shelter it for a few days. The guy wouldn’t scrape off the VIN number, said it was illegal but he did agree to keep it covered in a shed on the property before he sold it.
“What’s the matter son? Are you with The Brand?” the dealer had asked Awbrey after listening to his strange, furtive requests.
Awbrey said no, we was not a member of the Aryan Brotherhood, but some people from the government were looking for he and his little pal, who had a medical condition.
“I’ll say,” said the car dealer, taking one look at the boy. “Is it contagious?”
“Oh, uh. No, sir. It’s that he grows hair waaaaay too fast. They got a whole team of experts who want to look at him, for some military thing, and he’s had just about enough of their bullshit.”
“Military thing?”
“Yeah you know, fighting in cold climes? Or when you’re in survival mode out in the wilderness. Some sort of enzyme to make the hair grow. His body produces it like crazy,” Awbrey said.
“Who is he to you?”
“He’s my nephew,” Awbrey said before he knew what was out of his mouth. X just smiled really big.
“Well, son, my condolences,” the dealer said at last, seeming to believe them.
“Should have told him you were with The Brand,” X whispered “He’d a done it, fore, shore! And he didn’t believe your bullshit story by the way, though, nice try.”
“Shhhhhh,” Awbrey said.
“And did you have to buy a 1970s muscle car? This here sled’s only one county over from Hazard,” X asked as they pulled away again.
“Hazard?”
“Yeah, unc, as in Dukes of…?”
“Way too many reruns for a growing boy,” Awbrey hissed in disgust.
“I’m just saying it’s not very random of you.”
“Well, we need something I can work on if it breaks down.”
“If?”
“You’re not helping,” Awbrey said, adding “smartass.”
“Least I got to see the wider world,” X said dejectedly.
“I don’t understand modern cars. That’s why the dealerships charge so much to do anything. You can’t get your hands in there and fix things. Always have to have a lift and special tools,” Awbrey said.
“Planned obsolescence,” X said.
“So, why quantum physics?” X asked randomly.
“Timelines. You think of a building, right?”
“Uh-huh,” X said.
“Each little floor is a chunk of history,” Awbrey said.
“Yeah?”
“Modern human beings exist on, let’s say, the 23rd floor.”
“Okay, I’m with you,” X said.
“Neanders exist on Floor 22,” Awbrey said.
“Speed up. I’m still with you,” X said.
“Now, the building can be thought of as a company edifice that produces something.”
“What?”
“Widgets, atom bombs. Don’t get too far ahead of yourself, sport. It doesn’t matter for right now,” Awbrey said. “The point is, the floors, the walls, the bathrooms, are all laid out sort of like a maze, just like in a building.
“Mankind, and I mean baby mankind, and baby Neander-man, get off their respective elevators and are cordoned, corralled into certain rooms. And the rooms are laid out identically on each floor, but the ceilings and the floors separate these two counterparts as they negotiate their various mazes and find the tools they need to get into the next rooms, to do whatever it is they’re supposed to do before moving on with those tools in hand,” Awbrey said.
“And this is the explanation you gave the Air Force guy? I wish I had seen his face,” X said. “You don’t need a PhD to come up with this.”
“Yeah, he was pissed. But, he knew I was right,” Awbrey said. “It’s so simple, it’s been right under our noses the whole time.”
“So the walls are what?”
“Major events that run through the structure of the building, that send you and I down our own respective hallways into different rooms. Biblical shit, floods, eruptions, comet and asteroid impacts, diseases, stuff like that. Any periodic, natural, calamitous event that makes resources scarce and forces our respective developments a certain way, no matter what,” Awbrey said. “Walls in the office building that have no way to be circumvented, leading to walls of our own construction.”
“Wars,” X said.
“Now you’re getting it, X. Good boy.”
“Wait a sec? Who owns the office building?”
“Good question, but you’re getting ahead of yourself. Now, what I came up with for the Air Force, and this was about the time we met, I postulated that there is a certain point in the development of the monkey, where he gets too smart for himself. He gains the peak of his technical knowledge and expertise, which, forces him down corridors on the back side of the building. These events on the backside are what drive him back towards the elevator shaft; they are events that reduce him back down toward the spine of the family tree. The eighties rock group Devo had it right. They called the top and said everything forward of that time was de-evolution.”
“So that a little bit of him,” X interjected, “is used to form the monkey that emerges on the next floor.”
“Right. Now, the caretaker, the building manager that you asked about. He sees that the only window to the next floor for the monkey, is that event that forms the basis of the genetic timeline and elevator shaft. That tiny population of monkeys that survives, say, a polar-magnetic shift, and all its after effects.
“Caretaker, now, he’s a sneaky bastard and a quantum being. He can see time laid out like a building. And when you think about it in a four-d model, it is. All events are actually occurring simultaneously in his world view. Quantum theory teaches you that.
“He can ride the elevator, up and down. In fact, he doesn’t need an elevator. He has backstairs, keys to locked doors and hatches between floors; he has window-washing gear and he can get into any floor, any room, at any time he wants.”
“Kind of like a janitor landlord,” X laughed.
“Worse, his job is to drop in every now and then and direct the monkey as needed,” Awbrey said. “See this wall here, you’re about to run into it, turn do this…blab bla-bla.”
“Religion,” said X.
“If you think about it, every major religion has an apocalypse spelled out. Prophets Edgar Cayce and Nostradamus had very similar views on this as well. Notice that the religions themselves, are calling each other the great Satan right now. And there’s even a little guidebook in every one that details what the great Satan will look like.”
“Which is what?”
“A warlike human being who has a great public speaking voice. In short every intelligent human on the face of the earth. Isn’t that just great? Ain’t that convenient? Look in the mirror for examples. And yet the average human is, and has been, worked up into a lather trying to find this Anti-Christ in a finger-pointing, racist, ethnocentric rage.”
“On to the back side of the building, I suppose,” X said.
“And Caretaker is perfectly okay with that going on. So what does that tell you about him?” Awbrey said.
“He doesn’t give a shit?” X asked.
“He never did. In fact, all of our bullshit suits his purposes, just fine,” Awbrey said.
“You’re saying God, doesn’t care,” X said and he seemed happy with this theory.
“No, not God. Caretaker. There’s a big difference. Caretaker is just another creature. More advanced. We are sort of a hive, a farm, or a colony of creatures he uses.”
“He put us here, on the farm.”
“Likely not, in my view. But he conquered time-space, created his back passages, and he uses our goofy plundering through our respective floors to his advantage. To him, all our bullshit combined with natural events forms sort of a clock where he can keep his own timeline straight, so he doesn’t paradox himself, his own coworkers tweaking and manipulating humans on other floors.”
“Damn,” X said.
“Yeah, damn. You’re damn right, damn. But, and here’s the deal, right about the time the monkey gets too smart for himself, he actually becomes too smart for the caretaker’s purposes. He actually takes his first peek through one of the windows looking outside and he realizes where he is.”
“How so?”
“In his struggle for security he builds the atom bomb. In so doing he begins to see some of the laws of mathematics, physics, chemistry that bind up the universe. At that moment he understands that religion is far too arcane a construct to even begin to describe God. He begins to see the walls, doors, floors, everything and he realizes they can be circumvented.”
“And the Caretaker?”
“Well don’t you know old Caretaker he’s seen this kind of behavior before, in homo habilis, homo ergaster, homo heidelbergensis, homo neanderthalensis, because time really is laid out like a building where everything has happened, will happen, and is happening all at once. So, Caretaker knows just when to show up and stir the pot, keep the monkey’s interests moving in the right direction,” Awbrey said.
X leaned back in his seat and looked over at Awbrey. Was he being serious?
“Roswell, 1947,” said X.
“Good. You see where I’m going,” Awbrey said.
“What did the Air Force say when you came up with this one?” X asked.
“It was like they expected me to go in this direction. After I told them about the building construct, they knew where I was going, because by now they saw it too,” Awbrey said. “It was like a piece in a giant puzzle fell neatly into place.”
“But wait a second, are you saying that Neanderthals, my kind, developed to the stage of the atom bomb?”
“It’s highly possible and more than likely. Neanderthals roamed the planet for more than four hundred thousand years. As humans go, we’ve been here for only sixty thousand and look at us,” Awbrey said.
“But..”
“But nothing. Science is now proving that your kind had the capacity for language. That you can speak is evident in the fact we’re having this conversation. Your brain size on average was larger, not smaller than homo sapiens. Look at some of things you can do, X; you possess psychic abilities, you can smell a man who is hunting you from more than a mile!”
“But I thought we were wiped out in Europe, hunted down!”
“You were, by my kind. Remember the back side of the building. This was long after your societies had been destroyed in my opinion. The new and improved model finished you off.”
“Improved?”
“From Caretaker’s viewpoint, slightly less intelligent, way more aggressive, and we run faster than y’all.”
“So you’re saying…”
“All the shit we’re going through, your kind went through, before. You likely had the internet, television or their equivalents, Monday night football, World Cup Soccer, women’s rights, Vietnam, China, racial tensions, all of it. This has all been done before,” Awbrey said.
“But there would be evidence?”
“Picture a massive calamity. A polar reversal, or the like. Then throw a hundred thousand years on top of it for all, or most, of that evidence to be systematically erased by Caretaker.”
“Most?”
“You’re forgetting the titanium, lead-lined case found in Antarctica with your DNA inside it. At least two hundred thousand years old. Frozen, sealed so that no one would find it, so that a quarter million years of gamma rays would not destroy the structure of your DNA. That’s thought, that’s planning. That’s intelligence. That’s desperation,” Awbrey said.
“And what I can’t figure out is how they knew, how they did it, unless they too understood finally what was happening to them. They had no other option. They could see the building and they wanted to build their own little window to the next floor,” Awbrey said.
“How come Caretaker missed it?” X said.
“Because Caretaker is flawed, like us. He ain’t perfect. And if he has imperfections, he can be defeated and we can truly live free.”
“How would he be defeated?”
“One, the near impossible would have to happen. We agree to stop fighting each other as a species. That paradoxes the next floor. If you paradox him, this majorly screws up his itinerary and can physically destroy him in the floor above this one. See? You construct a new floor up there a floor where he is not the master, but we are.”
“Sure, some of the walls are going to be there. Big events which we can begin to predict the better we understand geology and astronomy, but other stuff, wars, and that, we can control!”
“You mentioned that the building produces something,” X said. “What is that?”
“Now we get to the heart of who Caretaker is, what he does,” Awbrey said. “The monkey…”
“That’s us, collective humanity,” X said.
“Right, the monkey builds stuff with his little-bitty mind and his opposable thumbs. He’s good like that. But, from Caretaker’s view, you don’t want him to get too smart. Now evolution is at work while his knowledge base grows. During those peak hours, just before he outsmarts not only himself, but you the Caretaker, he’s capable of a lot of things. You give him some technology you have at your disposal, like the semi-conductor. He fools with it, and then you give him something else, say, stealth-tech, or even anti-gravity drives. What does he do with it?”
“I don’t know?”
“What is his first inclination and by that I mean my species’ first inclination; it might not have been yours, remembering that mankind was bred for aggression to a certain extent?” Awbrey said.
“Weapons?”
“Weaponology. It is his first instinct because monkey is a paranoid motherfucker, above all other quirks and vices. He’s a natural born chicken-shit and he’s worried that the other guy across the fence, or the Berlin Wall, or the Great Wall of China might have figured this wonderful thing out on his own, see?”
“So?”
“Well, like William Penn and his beads for Pennsylvania, or whatever, or Cortez offering guns and steel, or Americans offering the Winchester rifle, Caretaker gives him baby steps so monkey man can think he’s ahead of the other guy. Meantime, Caretaker’s got monkey man’s busy little opposables working on other stuff as a trade off,” Awbrey said.
“Space ships.”
“Right. Stuff so secret not even God knows about it. He’s got him sending up huge secret satellite arrays pointing to the center of the galaxy to chat with who-the-fuck-knows. See?
“Caretaker likes his galaxial hot rods, likes zipping back and forth through wormholes and whatnot. But, he’s flawed. It’s likely he can’t breed anymore. It’s likely he needs timelines to keep everything straight in his own mind because when he zips off at light speed, then finds his way back through a worm hole, time has gone all caddywampus on him. He not only has to say ‘where am I,’ but he ask to ask himself ‘when am I?’ and that’s a very important question.”
“Why? How?”
“Don’t you see? He’s outsmarted himself. Little paradoxes and gamma bursts have screwed up his DNA so bad he can’t make babies. He also needs a time-clock so he doesn’t make the problems even worse and that’s where we come in. Our silly little histories and civilizations provide him with a calendar. ‘I’m on floor 22, room seven, chimp discovers fire’ that kind of deal.
“So he’s always been here?”
“From our perspective he has. He either evolved here, will evolve here, or some other kind of weirdness, an amalgamation of all creatures born to this planet in the past, present and future.”
“Dude!” said X.
“Yeah Dude!”
“But again, back to my original question, why you?” X asked.
“If I am not some sort of Oswald who will be left hanging with a wild assed story and no proof, it’d have to be my experiences with the esoteric knowledge,” Awbrey said.
“How so?”
“Our people were Welsh; superstitious, psychic, some of them. I have a feeling they knew on some level I have the background. It has to do with ancestors and so forth. Sometimes people have their ancestors sort of hanging around them, or in them, speaking to them and so on.
“My folks were big into all that knowledge,” Awbrey said.
“So, if…?”
“Right, your innate psychic abilities would be like a radio beacon to the dead of your kind. They would start speaking to you in one way or another, and I would be there to sort it out, explain to both you and your keepers what was happening to you,” Awbrey said.
“But you chose instead to bust me out of there,” X said.
“It wasn’t humane, the way you were living. That’s not a life. I couldn’t sit by and watch that happen, especially since….”
“Since what? Since I age so fast?”
“Something like that. I have to be straight with you, X. Cloning as we know it, has a way to go,” Awbrey said.
“Dolly the Sheep,” X said.
“Exactly, she aged too fast. It was like her genes knew how old she actually was,” Awbrey said.
“Or maybe Neander, owing to the exigencies of his hellish brutal life, had to age rapidly,” X said.
“There is that remote possibility,” Awbrey said.
“So your genius plan is, again, an appearance before congress, shock and awe,” X said.
“Yep,” Awbrey said.
“And knowing all that they know about you, unc, there isn’t the slightest chance they’ve predicted your next move?”

Chapter 7 Dipshits and Wizards

2009-10-05T06:22:00.000-07:00

Dec. 2. 2014 Washington D.C. Office of Senator Myles Stansil

“Surfing?” Stansil said.
“Surfing,” Epps said. “Here’s how it works; this guy Ryan Cogswell, who is our guy’s brother, was a surfer, who grew up a few doors down from this Tim Stanton in Melbourne Beach. They were surfing buddies.”
“Tim Stanton, why do I know that name?”
“Stanton started a little company, Highjump Products?”
“Oh shit, I know them. they make tents and stuff for camping, heavy weather gear, climbing boots and that kinda thing. That there is a good All American company.”
“Right well, Stanton, previous to Ryan’s death, was nothing more than a struggling high school principal at this place, uhm, Colonel Lamb’s in uh…”
“Florence, South Carolina. Good school to send your son if he’s a damned screw up, what’s wrong with that?”
“Well sir, there’s really no money trail we can find, that uh, we don’t know how he started a worldwide corporation right after Ryan Cogswell shot himself,” Epps said.
“And what the fuck has any of this to do with our boy?” Stansil demanded.
“Well sir, I am getting to that. See, Ryan, deceased, worked for Camerdyne, as do Gus Torrence and Jennifer Epstein, who we just attempted to vet one way or another. Epstein went to school with Ryan and Tim Stanton at Florida Tech, and they all had some of the same classes as undergraduates.”
“What about Torrence?”
“No, he went to UVA, then MIT, and then the Navy, but, see; then he went to work at Camerdyne, and he lived right down the street from Ryan, and he and Ryan were surfing buddies,” Epps said.
“Son? Surfers don’t form no anti-government cabals; they go surfing, smoke pot and whatnot. Now, I’ve got a guy comes from the county I need him to come from, right here in my hip pocket.”
“I know but…”
“Well why is this boy Ryan such a poison pill over there to the Camerdyne? What did he do to them beside shoot himself and maybe give his boyhood buddy some cash he found lying around?” Stansil asked.
“That I couldn’t tell you, sir. That file is buried way deep down the rabbit hole on need to know.”
“Ain’t you need to know? Ain’t you got any friends over there to the OIS? Are you that damned junior? Is there someone else I should be dealing with, here?”
“Well..”
“Lemme tell you sump’n. This shit here? This here is bush league. Now you get your act together son. We in the damned ball game, and we playin’ for keeps. I don’t care who you got to rat fuck, you do it, if you want a ride on my carpet. Like I say, I got this boy Cogswell eatin’ out of my hand, and we got him by the balls on this lady love business of his. We’s on the goal line and you’re talking about somebody someone else knew back in high school who smoked weed and played beach blanket bingo with so and so. I feel like I’m watching uh-uh goddamn Gidget rerun. Makes me sick just listening to you,” Stansil said.
“Sir, Tim Stanton disconnected his life from the grid within the same year Ryan, his buddy died. He disconnected his Savante Smart-Life System; divorced his wife; disconnected his auto Smartlife System, somehow established accounts in the Caymans, Belize, the Bahamas, Ireland and the UK. He possesses dual citizenship in the U.S. and Ireland, and he is working on dual citizenship in Belize.”
“So he got away with something, so what? You can’t put him anywhere near my boy, now can you? "
"He contributed to Senator Sean Cogswell's campaign: nearly two million dollars through various cut-outs," he said.
"Other than maybe some campaign contributions?”
“Look, Senator Stansil, we sent something rich down the pipe and we think it flushed out the other end in the form of Jennifer Epstein, Gus Torrence, who didn’t pass his polygraph; do you want to know what question Torrence failed?”
“Thrill me.”
“Have you ever met, Senator Sean Cogswell,” Epps said.
“Sean Cogswell. Sean Cogswell. You say it like it means sump’n. The man’s weak, I tell you. He ain’t planning nothing. I seen him moping around in a daze. He got that battle fatigue. Mind is shot through like a sieve. You know where he is right now?”
“He’s at some prison looking in on a friend who went bad after he came home from Afghanistan,” Epps said.
“That’s what he told me too, some buddy of his come back from the war and got himself in a whole mess of trouble, boo hoo hoo, and off he goes. He’s as soft as butter, that boy. Ain’t nothing to worry about unless you show me something better than this,” Stansil said.
“You find out what they got on Ryan Cogswell, ‘cause that, my friend, is why they still got a file over there on Sean. That’s the reason the OIS will continue to investigate the brother of a dead man, ‘cause the brother was trouble, not our boy here. Most likely whatever it was he didn’t even share it, otherwise, Sean would have never come back from the war zone. You find it, Epps, and let’s see what it is. Probably a whole mess of nothing…like I need this kinda headache when we are right here goal to go,” Stansil said.

#
Deep Below Sandia Mountain, New Mexico

“Why are we meeting like this, Colonel Epps?” said the man called Grimes.
“I’m encountering some push back on the issue of Ryan Cogswell, and I need you to backstop me,” Epps said.
Grimes leaned back in his creaky chair and adjusted his jet black oxford, then wiped a bit of dust off his matte black sock.
“Colonel, are you happy with your TDY here at OIS?”
“Absolutely, sir.”
“And when is your twenty years up?” Grimes said, but then, he always changed the subject.
“August 2016,” Epps said.
“It simply amazes me,” Grimes smiled.
“What, sir?”
“The waste of fine young talent. The swirling drain drawing the weak of heart toward the realm of the political,” Grimes said, two steps ahead, always.
“What kind of appointment do you hope to gain from Stansil as a retired colonel with a smattering of experience in intelligence?” Grimes asked. “Director of Intelligence? A cabinet position?”
“Something like that,” Epps admitted.
“And yet you have nothing on him, nothing solid,” Grimes said.
“There’s Savante, there’s…” he said.
“No, there is no Savante-Camerdyne. There is no corruption there, or, weren’t the road signs plain enough for you to read? Once the neural network is widely accepted, there will be no discussion of it; it will not make the news; no ‘plucky reporter’ will play the hero. And that is fact,” Grimes finished.
Before Epps could speak, Grimes had more to say.
“My experience has been that there are many doorways to power, one of them is through this agency. It can lead to an infinitely larger sphere,” Grimes said.
“If you say so, sir.”
“Do you want to know what power is, Epps? Power is the ability to requisition a hurricane; that’s power.”
“Why, to discredit a president?”
“Maybe it’s just because you can, Epps. Just because you can do that, and no one will question you about the need for it. That is power, not toiling away in an office, pleading with congress, being hauled before that collection of cats, mice and chickens, to answer for your deeds. I am talking about real power,” Grimes said.
“You said Savante-Camerdyne,” Epps said trying to get back on task.
“And I never misspeak,” Grimes countered.
“You’re saying, Savante is a cut-out,” Epps said.
“And you’re moving just fast enough to catch up, but not fast enough to have already known this before you walked in my door, which I find …. disappointing,” Grimes said.
Epps said nothing. This man terrified him to the bone.
“So you wish to know more about the little boy lost, Ryan Cogswell; yet you haven’t found anything solid on his friend Tim Stanton,” Grimes said.
“The senator wants to know the connection between this group and Sean Cogswell, the new senator from the Space Coast; and since Sean is Ryan’s brother…,” Epps said.
“You have the paradigm entirely on its head, Epps. Senator Stansil, doesn’t run you; you run him, understand?”
“Fine but I need to know more on Ryan,” Epps said, “Or it all falls apart.”
“To have more on him, you will have to be vetted for it; which will require a newer, deeper set of clearances; which will require …”
“New polygraphs etc. etc…”
“Let’s not be childish for a moment. Let’s live in the adult world, into which you have long since graduated. By now all that your previous polygraphs have taught you were the tools you need to fool the machine. We’re so far beyond that now.”
“So, what then, sir?”
“It will require a task that I shouldn’t have to spell out for you,” Grimes said.
“I ..I…” Epps was saying and meanwhile Grimes was nodding with a smile. Grimes had a look on his face as if the thought of wet work was actually giving him an erection. Epps knew better than to speak openly about it, as, among other things, this would kill the buzz Grimes was obviously savoring at the moment.
“You know sometimes Colonel, a man in a very deep hole, must keep digging, to make sure that hole does not cave in on him. Do we understand each other?”
“I think so, sir.”
“No, you know so. When you come back, you can have everything you need. Open to you will be the corridors of real power, colonel. Then you can decide whether or not some shabby political appointment will be worth your while.”
"And the task?"
The man named Grimes merely opened a drawer in his desk and plopped a file down before him.
"It should be handled immediately," Grimes said.

#

OIS offices, Pentagon

Lt. Colonel Kurt Warner stood over the members of the division responsible for “baby-intel” watching them work. It was a room filled with junior officers and investigators in their twenties, hacking and cracking the internet in ways that were easy, and mindlessly tedious.
Warner had risen from the ranks of these cubicles below the Pentagon soon after he had been TDY’d to the agency. His claim to fame was Project RENAME, of which he was now lord and master.
It was also now called “Baby intell” wherein the methods of counterintelligence were set loose upon the internet, to demonstrate the ways of the craft without having to explicitly state what they were. Most of these people were code monkeys to some degree. Their tasks were trivial; but it was in the execution they would demonstrate their ability in the game.
For instance, a code word would leak out into the wider world on a conspiracy website, and so it would be picked up by Google.
In the event that website started to get a great deal of hits, or another website popped up copying the first, one simply “sloshed” the internet with competing material in the form of websites, tweets, or mentions in others, which would replace the offending web site in the rankings until it was well down the listings. Usually the folks operating these rogue sites were loners; they couldn’t keep up with the tide.
The new sites would take the same name, and turn it into a brand name for a computer game, or a graphics program. Those searching for the reference would dig and dig trying to find it, and then they would give up as well. Over, done.
Project RENAME even gave away the tricky names to other government agencies. For instance “Phoenix Program” or “Operation Phoenix” was a CIA assassination detail carried out in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. The government decided that an easy way of erasing it historically was to give the same name to those geniuses over at the SETI project. They loved their “Phoenix”, named several of their babies after it; babies which hatched websites all.
RENAME also encouraged the use of a trade name “Phoenix” to be branded for human resources tracking software application, even gave the start-up some funds to get their business and their web presence up and running. Within a few years OPERATION PHOENIX was completely buried; gelded of potentiality for “blowback” to the government.
“ Phoenix? What Phoenix?”
Other tricks were needed for hard-hitting news stories. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, an alarming number of workers in the defense industry were involved in murders, suicides, or in some cases, both. The reasons were as deep and dark as the deaths themselves. Some were actual freak-outs. Others, suicides and murder-suicides of the workers, spouses and so forth, were the leavings of corporate and government “cleaners” tamping down dissent and blowback, and killing any potential informational threads.
Those news references made the web all the time. You couldn’t ignore a man killing his entire family and himself at noon on Wednesday after learning something horrendous at work. News covered instantaneous mayhem because it was easy. But they seldom dug for the reasons, seldom questioned the facts, and government certainly didn’t want any fringe freelancers getting any ideas of heroic exposes after the fact.
Warner’s group would ceaselessly hunt the net, find offending stories such as this, and barrage the news web pages with minor hacking assaults until the cracks were found at the urls, leading to the admin functions. Then, the baby coders of RENAME merely redirected the links to something else on the pages of a more innocuous nature, or they eliminated the stories altogether, leaving a big 404 error message. The media seldom checked their links to see how their old stories were doing. It’s too expensive and time consuming. There they sit; ignored within the first week after publication. RENAME goes in and deflates them like little shriveled balloons.
Kids love this sort of thing, thought Warner. The world is one big prank phone call; one big rush party where pretty people with good skin play silly tricks on the frumpy oldsters. Kids seldom gave a damn about the U.S. Constitution; since for the most part, high schools and colleges stopped teaching American history with any depth or passion any more.
Every service person swore to “uphold and defend the Constitution against enemies both foreign and domestic,” mouthing the oath with as much meaning as mumbled Shakespeare. And even if they understood the words, knew or cared about them, there was a curios transformation that occurred the moment you sat that same, civic-minded youngster in front of a computer screen. They became a predator with a loaded gun.
Warner knew all about it. This was him just a few short years ago. And the lords of misinformation adored what the combination of youth and technology brought them: newer, easier ways of fucking with people that were increasingly harder to trace.
Warner had been a star of brilliance in a division formerly called “Informational Failsafe” a dead end, no where, peopled with falling stars. Now he owned it. Now all that the higher-ups dreamed for were a hundred little Warner clones to indoctrinate every year. He became the gold standard. Once someone had gone through his program, you might even say they became “Warner Certified.”
The government was finding out that, different from micro-film files of old, and the ancient encyclopedias, history was very malleable, temporary and even erasable in some cases, courtesy of the internet.
The RENAME project, at the urging of the Air Force spun off an entire division tasked solely to counterintelligence of the UFO phenomenon on the internet. RENAME-Object grew faster than bacteria. Every year they wanted more and more of his division tasked to it, than any other arena.
Some of the initial web sites and blogs devoted to the phenomenon were serious threats to the Big Lie. Following the example of corporate acquisitions, Warner’s division began a campaign of hostile, content take-overs littering these sites with gibberish. In some cases the webmasters were made celebrities in their own minds; given a host of grateful fans who clicked into the tens of thousands a week, and didn’t even exist. These same fans submitted their slosh and crank. The hosts lost track of what the gig had been about and began bending to the wishes of the masses. They began taking money for paid ad-links “your site is great, just what we need! Keep it up!”
Soon, bible prophecies stood side by side with true accounts; wild stories of escaped mutants rutting with farm animals, adjacent to bonafide sightings with expert witnesses; pure garbage next to pure gold. And what had been a serious-minded site, with an unknown webmaster, became a joke, an ego pill for someone now playing to a non-existent crowd.
“Thank you thank you. Yes, I am the bomb!”
Warner would come by each cubicle and ask where a particular assignment stood. Technicians would rate the progression from newly discovered site, “zero percent full”; to stove-piped with “dip-shits and wizards”, AKA “ninety-percent.” And always the transformation was tame and gradual, so that the public would not become too alarmed, too fast; only angry, annoyed, and shuffling off to greener pastures.
Then the band-width problem surfaced in the form of YouTube et al in 2007; the “dip-shits and wizards” were sending in their videos; some of which were totally faked hokum. Of course, some of those submissions were not Photo-shopped etc., but were in fact real, alarming, and spooky. This generated interest from the national media, and Big Lie can’t have that.
This presented an interesting problem for Warner’s group: how to crank and slosh, when what the public paid attention to seemed real?
The problem was “solved” in the form of manufactured hyper-real video file footage and doctored stills. The agency contracted a studio in Venice Beach, California, to create short videos of impeccable quality; using models or CGI UFOs. But, like good programmers, a debunking back door was always built into the production, in the form of replicated palm trees, or very subtle differences in shadow.
It was real tradecraft for a while. The video company was paid well for their time and their people were sworn to secrecy. The submissions to YouTube were always made via highjacked systems and file servers. Kids knew all about doing this.
In one case the company had replicated the structure of a series of four parking-lot lights, atop a pole outside Disney studios. Without the light pole beneath them, the four lights appear to be components of some new form of lunar-lander, or perhaps the alien equivalent.
The film makers took this image’s basic ‘DNA’ and created a short film where the device seemingly flew over astonished tourists on a beach in the Dominican Republic, swept straight up into the sky and zipped off into a ball of light. It was hugely popular.
The hope was to entrap Larry King and other journalists who refused to quit paying attention to the UFO phenomenon, despite dire warnings that their Dan Rather experience awaited them unless they did. They didn’t bite but the YouTube video received more than on million hits before the hoax was outed, anonymously of course.
Another brilliant stroke was the time Warner’s little cadre digitized the image of Darth Maul on a flying scooter from Star Wars; shrank it, had the image imprinted on a grainy video, and sent it to a Mexican television station as evidence of more flying humanoids. Then of course, the experts came flooding out of the woodwork to burn down that straw man: “That’s from a damned Lucas movie called Star Wars, people, c’mon!”
But all this backfired when the serious ufologists began to smell a huge rat with an agenda and a big budget, somewhere in the house of government. They began investigating and publicizing their findings, which demonstrated the elaborate lengths someone would go to, to create hoaxes. Though his plans displayed genius and virtuosity in inception, he had been young-minded and incautious in execution. He was told to cool it.
And yet, thought Warner with a smile, the heyday of his career as a pirate movie producer gave nearly everyone on both sides of the Big Lie, a reason to laugh at how out-of-whack the situation had gotten regarding UFOs.
Right now his kid-coders were rounding up all references to the Mejia event in Coleman, Texas a month ago.
The event itself was pure freak show: flying lizard-dogs had torn apart nearly fifty head of cattle, gnawed a rancher up and down, leaving him to die. Away they had flown into the dusk, leaving a sobbing widow, and an unbelievable story.
Warner needed to be sure there were no threads leading to NORAD who had taken away one of the actual flying lizard dogs.
The hazmat team had been witnessed entering the Mejia property by the ambulance crew, and Juan’s wife Rosa remembered the agency that had first responded, by name.
NORAD officials had gone to the ranch because Cheyenne Mountain had observed the two craft encroaching on U.S. air space. Just them showing up in Coleman Texas that fast, said a lot about NORAD’s methods and capabilities. That they were then able to summon a hazmat team within a few minutes, also went to methods, capabilities, response time, all this on top of the Big Lie aspect.
Fortunately there had been no independent witnesses confirming the UFOs, but news media was beginning to sniff on all the stories coming from locals and the staff at Coleman Memorial. The buzz was approaching critical mass. Rosa Mejia had even filed a police report which was public record now. That, in itself, could be a news item.
But the news media, like the public, did have its share of “useful idiots” who could be depended on to further discredit the story. Mostly, these were senior folks interested in job security, editors and producers who could be counted on to mandate that sharing witness testimonials, be given in their customary “gee wiz, you don’t say” dead-pan, dripping with ironic disbelief. They might even be tempted to use that faded soundtrack from the X-Files on television broadcasts, which could do the job killing the entire story at a stroke.
But every so often, you’d run into a stubborn journalist, a grudge reporter who would dog that baby until some shred of proof surfaced.
The first place to kill it was at the blog or twit stage before that happened. Warner’s baby coders had unearthed a great tid-bit: seventeen years ago, Juan Mejia had done three days of detoxing after a DUI arrest in Coleman. Since then, he had been a regular attendee at local AA chapters. Blogs and Tweets in which Juan was mentioned would be peppered with anonymous postings obliquely referencing Mejia’s past with alcohol, just to get the ball rolling.
“I’ve known him for years and I want people to stop talking about his alcohol problem. He hasn’t touched tequila in a decade.” This was precisely the right touch.
More would come out to champion their friend, “alcoholic, maybe. But he’s been sober for years. He was a good man, leave him alone! Let the widow be!” and by then even the most enterprising reporter would run from the story rather than bring it back to an editor or producer.
“You mean the drunk rancher? You want to cover the drunk rancher who saw the flying reptiles? Are you familiar with our employee reduction program?”
Another avenue was the “delirium of sickness” angle. People reacted to hospital pain medicine in different ways, especially when mixed with other forms of over-the-counter medication. There were all sorts of accounts on the web one could point to with links.
“Same thing happened to me years ago; I didn’t even know I was allergic to it and then bam, I’m talking to the worlocks in the walls!”
After an hour of watching them work, Warner felt sure this situation, at least for now, was contained. There wasn’t the first mention, yet, of the cyber chip; nor the fact that the Savante knock-off had apparently grown nerve tissue which had drilled itself through the skull of the creature and was in direct electronic communication with its brain; nor that the chip had been made in China.
For now all they needed to do was finish up with their blog work, then begin smothering links for “Juan Mejia,” “Coleman Texas” and “Coleman Memorial” with other, unrelated clickable references, and the item would be buried.
“We’ve got a new stack from Amazon, kids,” Warner said after a while.
This elicited the expected groans from the cubicles.
They were each expected to take one UFO book newly-hatched from the distributor, read it, then post a review savaging the work of the ufologists. This was a weekly assignment that no one enjoyed since it was somewhat like homework.

Chapter 6 Hall of Horrors

2009-10-02T07:38:00.000-07:00

(Copyright David Anthony Kearns. All rights reserved. For entertainment of the reader only, commercial use in any form prohibited.)

Nov. 17, 2014 Kissimmee Florida – Tim Stanton sat inside the roadside café diner with Sean Cogswell eating pumkin bread and gator tail.
“Already? He said that?”
“Yeah, he did, Tim.”
“You’re thinking it’s hot air, too soon?” Tim said flatly.
“Maybe it’s like you and Gus said. He’ll need to sweet talk me, so he can take some of that defense money from the Space Coast. They want to open a Savante industrial complex between Atlanta and Macon when the neural network gets the full nod,” Sean said.
“He told you about that? He was that open with you?”
“Naw, my guy Hernandez is looking in on things for me about the bill making it through the House. This is pork payoff,” Sean said.
“You may have to vote for all of that, so he doesn’t doubt your loyalty,” Tim said.
“Yeah, Timmy, uh, I don’t know man. I’m hearing some wicked things about this Bubbling business,” Sean said.
“I know but, THAT’S going to happen, with or without you. The shear tonnage of force behind that has mass, inertia. It can’t be stopped …it…”
Tim exhaled. He needed to calm down. With only his eyes and an annoyed expression, Sean had quietly reminded Tim, that he was the senator, and he would decide.
“Sorry, Senator. Look I meant no disrespect, you vote your heart. But from the plan’s perspective, my advice to you would be to sidle up to the guy. I mean, that’s the big game, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Sean said. He looked outside the limo and shook his head.
“You look tired, Seanny. What’s up?”
“Keep having these nightmares,” he said.
“Iraq?”
“And Afghanistan. I keep thinking about Ryan, and his son, Kyle. The boy looks so much like him now. Just breaks my heart the kid wants to go into the Marines. I don’t know what to say to him. He keeps emailing, texting me, tweeting,” Sean said.
“Talk to him. He looks up to his uncle, what’s wrong with that?”
“Goddamn it, Timmy. I wasn’t any kind of hero over there. I was as chicken-shit as they come. Training took over and saved my ass, nine times out of ten,” he said.
“What about the tenth time?” Tim said.
Sean leaned back in his seat and exhaled long and hard. “That? I don’t know what that was, and I still don’t understand it. I walked into a building filled with insurgents and walked out without a scratch. But, it wasn’t like it was me, it was like there was some force; like I knew where everyone would be,” he said.
“You remember when you told me your brother would talk to me at some point after he died?”
“I said that?”
“Yeah, the night we cremated him.”
“I guess so.”
“Maybe he talked to you, just at the right time. Maybe he speaks to you when you really need to hear it,” Tim said.
“I need to hear from him now. What do I tell Kyle? I mean we got this mess in the Philippines now, Pakistan is coming apart, Central America? Ryan would not want Kyle anywhere near all this,” Sean said.
“Hey, one thing at a time,” Tim said leaning across and grabbing Sean’s hands.
“That’s more of your training coming through,” Sean said, “How’s that going?”
Tim pulled out a white poker chip and laid it on the formica table-top.
“Thirty days. I get a green one next,” Tim said.
“What’s it like?”
“Honestly?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“If I hadn’t done it, I’d be dead in a year. I keep reminding myself this may not look like a war zone as you know it, Sean, but it is. Everything we’re finding out? Last week, Wellington and his wife came back with this data from this college in Christchurch, a list of additives they’ve found in cigarettes made since 2011?”
“And?”
“Did you know Lyons-Kinnerly was putting crack fucking cocaine in the damned cigarettes?”
“No way,” Sean said.
“Way way. The mashed leaves go through a soak of some sort, and apparently that soak includes cocaine in solution. Of course there’s a Mexican brand without the crack, but uses the same process. The active in that soak? Crystal meth,” he finished.
“That’s an expensive process,” Sean said.
“Yeah, with malicious intent and a huge profit. Two birds, one stone.”
“So, what? Beer..?”
“Who knows? Tip of the iceberg.”
“What about the FDA?”
“Pfhhhhh…What about ‘em. C’mon Seanny. You know I started thinking about this and started asking myself about your brother’s behavior at the end, and how emotional he got, how much he was drinking and smoking. You know he smoked LKs?” Tim said.
“Timmy, Ryan was bi-polar,” Sean said.
“And I’m an alcoholic, and between the two maladies, there’s about a pendejo’s difference,” Tim said.
“I don’t know if this is something I can tackle just now, Tim. I wouldn’t even know where to start,” Sean said.
“Just focus on the plan, Sean. And drink wine if you must. So far the Kiwi and Aussie brands are coming up clean. As far as big tobacco, that will come out in The New York Times next week. Then it will be the FDA’s problem; that is if anyone will listen.”
“So, this is them,” Sean said.
“Seanny, what you will learn after looking at it for a while is, it’s always them. It has been them, it will go on being them, and it’s only going to get worse,” Tim said.
“You sound just like Ryan,” Sean said to this before asking; “Do you trust this guy, Wellington?”
“Why, because he’s a Kiwi?”
Sean nodded.
“Like your brother, on some of these things we go with our gut,” he said. “Now I better get back to the hotel before your man in the limo starts to wonder what’s up.”
“I hear you,” Sean said.
“Seanny, just remember one thing about your brother,” Tim said as he stood up.
“What’s that?”
“He didn’t kill himself; he allowed himself to be martyred,” Tim said. “There’s a big, big difference.”
Sean nodded. Tim was right. He needed to remember that.

Nov. 15 2014Dulce, New Mexico

Jennifer Epstein and Gus Torrence walked down three flights of stairs into a sub-basement fortress owned and operated by the U.S. Air Force. Gus was very nervous. Jennifer assured him through smiles that everything would be alright.
In front of them was a colonel named Epps. He used a card key to open a door into a spare looking room filled with light, a single table and three metal chairs. On their left was an enormous mirror.
Epps began by opening two dossiers.
“Dr. Epstein is cleared to be here but I don’t see that you are, Dr Terrence,” Epps said.
“Colonel, Dr. Torrence is a specialist in mechanical engineering structures, I thought he could …”
“That’s likely not the sort of expertise we need here,” Epps said.
“Well, in that I don’t know why I am here either, I thought of the best and brightest scientist engineer I knew when you called me,” Jennifer said.
“Camerdyne has been brought in to diagnose a problem for the Air Force, I can tell you that, but first, I need to ask Dr. Torrence a couple of question,” Epps said.
“That’s fine, shoot,” Gus said.
“What is your association with a Mr. Ryan Cogswell,” Epps said.
“What?”
“Dr. Torrence, let me assure you, you are in the heart of a U.S. Air Force facility which is hyper-secure and miles from anywhere familiar to you. The way this works is, I ask…”
“Ryan was a co-worker who lived a couple of streets over from me in Indian Harbor Beach, Florida. I surfed with him a few times. Nice guy. I was sad to hear he had committed suicide,” Gus said.
“Did you know his brother, the U.S. senator?”
“Decorated Marine to boot. I was proud to hear he’d been elected.”
“Do you know Senator Cogswell?”
“Never met the man, personally,” Gus said.
“Yet, you say you are proud,” Epps said.
“I’m proud because I voted for him. He promised to do his part to clean up Washington. I was proud that family had a reason to experience a little joy after the death of Ryan, as was everybody who lived in Indian Harbor Beach, and Melbourne Beach, and everyone who knew him at Camerdyne, Colonel,” Gus said. “Does that answer your question?”
There was a long pause. Epps stared at Gus for a full ten seconds then closed the dossiers.
“What we have here, what I am about to show you, is some type of exposure which has had a seriously deleterious effect on some of our personnel,” Epps said.
“Out this door you will come to a hallway. On your left you’ll find a series of cubicles each of which opens to an individual cell, each of which contains one airman. No ranks will be revealed, hopefully, no family questions will be asked or answered. You have note pads at your disposal in the first cubical. You will be able to hear them, should they decide to speak, take down their stories, whatever information they give you. We need your impressions on whatever it is they may be suffering in a report, in five days. You’ll be given two hours in the Hall of …of ..”
“Of what?” Gus asked.
“Nothing just a little nickname they give it now, the Hall of Horrors. You’ll see,” Epps said. “Oh and, uh, Dr. Torrence, you’ll need to submit to a full lifestyle before you leave today,” Epps said.
“Oh?”
“Yes, sir. You’ll be notified within sixty days, about your new clearance. Is there a problem with that?”
“No but, I had hoped y’all could get me back home by at least nine eastern standard,” Gus said.
“You, don’t expect a full lifestyles polygraph to be an extended affair, do you Dr. Torrence?” asked the officer somewhat menacingly.
“No, not at all,” Gus said.
“Good it, shouldn’t take anymore than an hour, two at the outside. Now, if you will…”
He escorted them into the Hall of Horrors and the two took up their seats before the first cubical. Gus noticed a pair of dark sunglasses next to each of the note pads.
“What are these for?” Gus asked.
“In case you need them, sir. I really can’t answer any questions at this point as it will skew what we’re trying to do here. So, listen to what, if anything, the airmen say; write your impressions, write a report, for which you will be paid handsomely,” Epps said.
“There’s a room at the other end of the hall, where I will wait for you with your confidentiality agreements,” he said and walked off.
The lights went on in the room before them. A man in an Air Force styled pajama and a bathrobe jumped from the bed and approached the window.
“How many times are you going to ask me these questions? My name is John Stearn, I am the pilot of the space vessel Collossus, I am thirty-five years old, Dr. Epstein. Doctor Torrence, no I do not know what materials the ship was made from precisely.
“We were a week out heading toward Zeta when something went wrong…”
“Slow down, slow down,” Jennifer said.
“From my perspective this is like the five-hundredth time you have asked me these questions, I am trying to jump ahead,” the man said approaching the window now in a frenzied fashion.
“Tell us about the propulsion system,” Torrence asked.
“The system is classified, which is what I told you the last time you asked me that,” Stearn said.
“Okay wait, from your perspective, this is the one hundredth time?”
“Are you people deaf, as well as stupid? It’s more like five hundred,” he said.
“I am sorry, airman,” Epstein said.
“No, I am sorry. Please forgive me,” he said.
“How long, did it take you to reach five hundred times telling us this, Airman Stearn?”
He stopped in his tracks. He was stumped. Soon the broadest of smiles crossed his lips. He looked like a boy who had just won the soup-box derby.
“That, was a good question, Dr. Epstein. Thank you,” Stearn said.
“For what?”
“Asking me a question you haven’t previously asked. And the excellent thing is, see? I don’t know the answer! Can you believe that!?”
“Airman..?”
“Doctor Epstein I just have to say I am a sucker for a woman with big brown eyes, did you know that?”
And now he was lost. He was just standing there with an enormous smile on his face.
“I love you,” he said, looking through the glass at her. “I really do love you, a lot.”
Gus clicked off the “speak” button.
“What the hell is this, Jen?”
“Quantum effect of some sort. Did you see the way he knew our names?”
“Maybe he’s psychic?”
“Maybe this is what psychic is all about?”
Jen pressed down the speak button but Stearn was undressing. He started singing Olivia Newton John’s “I Honestly Love You” so Epstein cut off the sound again.
“What the hell did he mean by Zeta?” Gus asked.
“Gee, Gus, I don’t know, the constellation Zeta Reticuli?”
“Could be Kathryn Zeta-Jones, for all we know,” Gus said.
She clicked the speak button, and Stearn smiled still undressing, singing Olivia’s smash hit.
He stopped, looked up at her and said without prompting; “yes, Zeta Reticuli, Dr. Epstein and I do honestly love you.”
“Okay, thanks,” she said, letting go of the speak button. “God this is weird, that was like my favorite song in seventh grade. I had a boyfriend…”
“He wants you to speak to him again. You’d better, he’s getting ready to take off his underwear Jen,” Gus intoned.
The sound came on and Stearn said, with a wry conspiratorial smile; “Martin Schroyer, Martin Schroyer…yeah, baby!”
The airman was writhing and dancing around the room, thrusting his pelvis back and forth, saying “Martin Schroyer, yeah!”
“Please don’t take off your underwear, airman,” Jen said.
“That’s not what you said last time, Dr. Jennifer Epstein,” the airman said.
“Jen, look at the glass, it must be a foot thick. Why would that be?” Gus asked.
“See if the airman knows,” Jennifer said.
“Airman what can you tell me about this glass?”
“From what they tell me, that is leaded-plexi with a titanium alloy in the mix, Dr. Torrence. It is there for your protection, as I must have told you now, like a hundred and ninety times,” Stearn said.
“Why?”
“It is there to combat some of the effects we are experiencing in here. I’ll be with you in a moment,” the airman said wandering over to a stainless steel john in the corner of the cell.
The airman, now naked, proceeded to urinate while continuing his song.
“You should back away from the glass at this time and please do not forget your eyewear,” he said holding up a finger.
The sound came like a wave down the hall as both scientists donned their glasses. It felt as though the earth was about to split open. Lights flashed from the other cells reflecting against the back of the hall. Neon bulbs in the facility dimmed and grew white hot in waves.
Laughter, the howls of hell, screams erupted from every cell, including the one occupied by Stearn. Inside his cell he seemed to levitate and twirl in the center of the room. Images flashed on the walls, monsters of indescribable horror in strobe succession appeared and disappeared like pop ups in some child’s book from the underworld. Some whirled with him in a dance, reptiles, dinosaurs, snakes, creatures that looked like lobstrocities, faster and faster in a cyclonic tornado of mayhem.
A green, electric wind smashed against the window. It seemed a paw-print of a bloodied, fanged beast smeared the glass, but the image soon evaporated.
Then, as soon as it began, the storm was over. There lay Stearn in the center of the room, naked.
“Sorry about that,” he said wiping spittle and vomit from his nose and mouth.
“John, can you tell me what happened to you out there,” Epstein said again.
“Jenny, so concerned for your fellow human being. This is what I deeply admire about you, darling.”
“Please John, try to concentrate,” she said.
“Tell me you love me again, Jenny,” he said.
“I love you, John. Okay?”
He rolled on his back still humming Olivia Newton John.
“Call me Johnny, like you did last time. Say, “I love you Johnny,’” he said.
She looked over at Gus and clicked off the speak button.
“He’s reliving this particular moment, over and over,” she said.
“Like that movie, Groundhog Day,” Gus said.
“Probably name the scenario after the movie, yeah,” she said. “In these other frames of reference, I must have tried everything to get him to talk, and over the course of it all, from his perspective, he bonded with me,” she said, wiping a tear from her eyes.
“Well I’ll be damned,” Gus said.
“So horrible,” she said, letting out another tear or two. “It’s just so fucking horrible. They must have gone into deep space at light speed then back again some other way. They must have done it poorly…and…quantum corruption, embolism, temporal shift”
“He’s waving again. He wants to talk to us,” Gus said hitting the speak button.
“Jenny, c’mon,” Stearn said.
“I love you Johnny, now please can you…”
“You guys shouldn’t stay here too long, okay? Gus? Get her out of here as fast as you can,” he said.
“Why, John?”
“Because freaking Plexiglas won’t stop you from catching this, whatever it is. You can get sick too, okay?”
Gus clicked the speak button again but Stearn just waved his middle finger at them.
“This monkey isn’t talking to you anymore, doctors, so good day now,” he said.
Gus moved to press the speak button again but in a micro-second, Stearn had sprang from a prone position, moved a distance of twenty five feet across the room and was standing right in front of the glass.
“Get her the fuck out of here now, Gus!” he screamed. Stearn reared back and slammed his fist into the glass as hard as he could, sending a shudder through the room and putting a dent in his side of the screen. The dent began to heal itself. Stearn’s wrist sustained a compound fracture.
The two got up and backed away.
“Thanks for stopping. See you next time,” Stearn chimed sweetly.
The thunderous sounds and catterwalling began again within all of the thirteen cells, only louder than before. Lights, winds, sounds of every imaginable creature, extant and non. Someone was screaming a litany, a roll call of violent conflicts into the future.
“War with the Chinese over water rights, Antarctica 2019. War on mars with Europa, 2037 over archeological and mineral resources.. War with reptile nation on the moon for rights to the ice reserves 2038…war, war war war!”
They burst through the exit at the other end of the hall and slammed the door behind them. Jennifer held her chest, and nearly vomited.
“Well that was quick,” said Epps nonchalantly.
“You want us to go back?” Gus said.
“Not necessary. My job was to give you up to two hours if you chose to stay. You actually lasted longer in there than most of the staff,” Epps said.
“You should call that the Hall of Heroes, for what those people have been through, Colonel,” Gus said.
“You are not to tell me anything about what you witnessed or experienced. We can’t read you into this fully, until you are vetted for it,” Epps said.
“Would you like a glass of water, Dr. Epstein?” he asked in mock chivalry.
“Yes, please,” she said, taking a seat.
“Make that two, if you would please, Colonel,” Gus said with disdain.
Epps left the room.
Gus was about to speak with Jennifer openly and she could sense it. Her eyes darted to the large mirror beside the table. They were being watched and recorded no doubt.
Gus merely sighed.
Jennifer realized that those people in those cells were hopeless cases. The Air Force couldn’t do anything for them, and they likely had as much information to make their own determinations about what had happened to them as they were ever going to get. Having her and Gus here was more about testing her and Gus, than anything they could learn about the effects of deep space travel.
She took her pencil and wrote two letters on the pad ‘SH’, then erased them.
Safe House, thought Gus. He looked at her questioningly, and she nodded. They were on the same page. They should not discuss anything about this until they reached the safe house, in Palm Bay, Florida.

Chapter 5 Smart-Lie

2009-10-01T17:59:00.000-07:00

(Copyright David Anthony Kearns, all rights reserved)

(Copyright David Anthony Kearns all rights reserved. For entertainment of the invidual reader only. No commercial reuse, concepts, ideas, dialogue, plot, characters)

Nov. 15, 2014 Capital Hill – Senate Subcommittee Briefing on Defense Appropriations/Intelligence sector.
Georgia’s Myles Stansil was speaking down to a well dressed gentleman sitting at a long table before the dais, but he wasn’t speaking to the man , so much as acting as the fellow’s mouthpiece.
This was Carlos Mercado, founder of Savante Systems Inc. Whom Forbes Internet recently deemed “Super-Mercado” a one-man market force unto himself. Mercado, as Stansil liked to say in private chats with colleagues on the hill, in that studied, folksy manner of his “…could cause a huge up-tick in the stock market with just a decent bowel movement in the morning.”
Savante had produced SmartLife Systems Inc., “For home, office, car for your Life!” They had the Gregorio platform on just about every mainframe and desktop in the country.
But Stansil was also alerting the defense subcommittee that there was evil afoot in the way of a bill rising in the House of Representatives, that would attempt to limit or restrict the sale of Savante’s Neural Desktop system; a system that had already been approved and released and was enjoying excellent sales, even if the stock had taken a hit with the news of the proposed bill.
In his inimitable skill with a blunt, impactfull talking points, Stansil said “unscrupulous, techno-haters on the hill” were throwing everything they could find at Savante’s company; “no objection seems too ludicrous” the forty-something senator told committee members.
Epps walked behind Senator Stansil, sat to his left at an empty seat near the wall, leaned over and set the folder down; apart from the senator’s briefing papers, but close enough if he needed to lay a hand on it for a look.
Stansil was a classic, rumpled, gray-suited republican in the mold of Newt Gingrich; the only difference being a defined and rich southern accent, whereas the former minority whip had no pronounced Georgia drawl at all. Stansil, a former University of Georgia football star and coach, had gone somewhat softly to pot in recent years, but he was still very feisty and his steely-blue eyes missed nothing.
“And I don’t need to tell my esteemed colleagues in this chamber how important the Neural Desktop is to our battle plans for the war on terror,” the senator was saying as Colonel Epps walked in.
Not to say this was a scripted exchange between Mercado, a Miami entrepreneur with more than twelve billion in assets and Stansil, who was quietly accepting campaign contributions from the courtly Cuban American, but it couldn’t have played better to their mutual benefit for the moment, for there were reporters in the room, and they knew news when they heard it. “Techno-haters on the hill” had the alliteration they needed, not to mention a hint of street jargon that would play well to late twenty-something. News concerning the “decades old war on terror,” always sold ad space all over the internet.
“Correct senator,” said Mr. Mercado into his microphone. “But if the government limits the civilian retail side of my operations to nothing, there won’t be a Savante Systems Inc. in three years, and the Neural Desktop will die in its infancy. That’s how committed we are to the ND. Time, money, lives have been invested in the research and development…”
“Ladies and gentlemen, do we hear the voice of private industry, crying out not only to protect us from ourselves, but to merely survive? Do we hate technology and industry so much we won’t listen? After the disastrous days of the last depression can you not… ” asked Stansil.
“Excuse me Mr. Mercado,” said a democrat from Illinois, Barbara something or other, thought Epps.
“Senator, uh, Thomond you had something?” Stansil asked, getting the name wrong on the pronunciation. He said it like “Thow mund” emphasis on the ‘tho’ as though the female senator was something he’d like to ‘thow’ out with the trash.
The senator from Illinois ignored his folksy style but her face bore the trace of irritation as she began.
“It is my understanding the bill seeks to curtail corporate policy demanding the implant of the neural desktop as a precondition of employment. Now, this might curtail a portion of the corporate end of his business for the common good, but it certainly won’t touch the retail side if people want to go out and spend their hard-earned bucks on it.
“And I must say for the record, Mr. Mercado, it is truly a brave new world, sir, when a corporation begins demanding that their employees be fitted with a mind communication device, before they can come to work. The neural desktop is an invasive procedure, sir, that requires implanting a chip inside the head of the recipient,” Thomond said.
“You object to that, I can see by the look on your face, Carlos,” Stansil said.
Giving Mercado a chance to speak gave Epps the break he was looking for to direct the senator’s attention to the report coming from Coleman, Texas. The senator looked down to the report placed there by Epps while Mercado took flight with his customary schpiel.
“Well I had hoped to avoid elements of this speech until the House was preparing to vote, but I’ll share some of it with you now. As we talk, here, my company’s stock value fluctuates on every word; the jobs of more than seventeen thousand individuals who are employed by Savante Systems Inc, also ride on these words.
“Words such as “implants” and “invasive procedures” not only are harmful to my company’s position, harmful to the economy, and detrimental to our national security, they are quite simply inaccurate; to the extent that, any more, they must be considered for what they are, senator, deliberate falsehoods designed to thwart not only my business, but progress in general.”
“Mr. Mercado we don’t deal in falsehoods here,” the senator from Illinois bristled. “ If you have to make an incision, it’s invasive by definition, sir, and…” she said.
Mercado kept right on talking as if he hadn’t heard the senator or didn’t care.
“Sixteen eminently respected neurosurgeons have come forward in support of the neural desktop. It is no more invasive than the old Blue-Tooth products of the early 2000s. An “implant inside the head” seems to imply some sort of sinister connection, some kind of brain surgery required, when in fact it is no more drastic than getting your ears pierced, senator.
“The chip is nothing more substantial than a tiny sliver of plastic, one centimeter square that is slipped harmlessly between the skin and the hard bone behind the ear. The patented technology makes use of microwaves working in concert with brainwaves. At no time do the neurons of the brain actually come in contact with the circuitry of the chip. It is a miracle of communication that has applications…”
“And yet you call this device the neural desk-top,” Senator Thomond said.
“For marketing purposes,” he said.
“And all the House is trying to do, sir, is limit corporations from forcing an employee to adopt this technology as a condition of employment. It’s unconstitutional, is it not?” she said.
“Well, back in the 1990s they had the same argument about cell phones, did they not?” he responded, “without the first shred of evidence at cell phones caused cancer. Senator, if the job candidate doesn’t want the technology, he or she, can simply exercise their constitutional right to seek employment elsewhere,” Mercado said.
“Yes, someone who spent a fortune gaining a four-year degree in engineering or finance can wander right down the street to Shakey’s Pizza I suppose, Mr. Mercado, and begin dicing endive for lunch customers. Practically speaking, sir, we see where this is leading and some of us, don’t like the end result!”
Stansil had seen enough of the OIS report. He needed to speak with the Air Force Colonel alone. He neared the microphone.
“Ah, madam senator, where this is leading is nowhere today, as this is a hearing on defense spending. We’ve already budgeted for this man’s product to be incorporated in our overall plan for troops on the ground. If his company goes belly-up, that money does not get spent over the next three years, and likely will go somewhere else in the larger budget, perhaps the ladies’ cotillion fund. Let’s table this for now, and see where the House goes. Perhaps if they get a lick of sense in the next three months, they may drop this whole silly idea of slowing up American business. I can tell you right now, for our end-game on the war of terror, we need what this all-American company offers us,” said the chairman.
“Thank you, senators,” Mercado said.
As the committee broke for lunch Stansil waved for Epps to follow him to his offices.
“Who knows about this?” the senator demanded as they walked down the corridors toward his senate office.
“Elements of NORAD, and of course our OIS guy, Warner,” Epps said.
“Is he kosher?”
“As a dill pickle. He hopes to work with us in the future, if you know what I mean, senator.”
“This report says the chip may be a knock-off of the Savante technology?”
“Yes sir,” said Epps.
“How did they get it?” the senator asked.
“Mercado has all sorts of folks working for him, and his retention rate is about average for a company his size,” Epps said.
“So they work for him a while and then head on back to China taking the knowledge with them. Jesus, when in hell are we gonna learn?” the senator asked.
“Yes sir,” said Epps.
“Says here there was some type of architecture extending out from the chip through the cranium of the creature,” the senator said. “That’s new…”
“I thought you’d pick up on that,” said Epps.
“Don’t be a smartass. And you’re sure, Warner is kosher?”
“Yes sir,” said Epps.
“Tell him if he can keep this quiet, through whatever Svengali powers of amazing influence he can wield, we’ll make room for him. The man wants a ticket on the bus, he can earn it right now,” the senator said.
“Senator Stansil, you have your luncheon with the newly-elected senator from Florida,” said his secretary as they entered the senator’s outer office.
“What was his name again?”
“Senator Cogswell, Sean Cogswell,” she intoned.
“Aw sheep-shit, I forgot…..Ooops! He ain’t here yet is he?” asked the senator embarrassed at his own vernacular, although this clumsy, folksy business of his was all an act.
“Not yet, he was running about fifteen minutes late,” she smiled.
“Good, I’ll be in conference with the colonel here, I don’t want to be disturbed by no reports of kitty cats in trees, or school tours marching through, you hear, Lila?” he said.
“Yes senator,” she said. “I hear you.”
As they entered the senator’s office, he said; “ Now can this guy Warner deliver? Or do we need to get someone in CIA to run counter-intell on this deal.”
“Oh, Warner’s top notch, senator. Let him earn his seat on the bus as you said.”
“Alright now, what do we know about this fella’ Cogswell?”
Epps pulled out another file.
“Warner said for some reason OIS has been following Cogswell since way back, but, other than some hanky-panky with a married gal, he’s as clean as a whistle.”
“Hanky Panky? I like it. Been a long time since I’ve heard that phrase, so few men have the balls anymore to play it,” the senator said looking at the picture given him by Epps. It showed Cogswell with his arm around the waist of a woman in a white sequin dress outside a hotel.
The senator whistled appreciatively, dropped the photo back in the file, and from a silver bowl on his desk, picked up a football given him by the UGA team of 2009. The National Champions thanked him for his service as the team’s offensive coordinator.
The senator sat, began twirling it around on his palm as he leaned back in his chair and staring at Epps. He wondered if Epps had ever played the Hanky Panky. Epps seemed to Stansil as sexless as a naked “Ken” doll. Was Epps capable of below-the-belt urges or had the Air Force Academy, and all his stiff promotions washed all his manly pangs from him?
“Well?” asked the Senator.
“Well, what senator?”
“Tell me about the Hanky-Pank, boy. C’mon, give…!”
“As you saw from the photo, she’s quite the bombshell,” Epps said.
“I’ll say. What’s this woman’s name?”
“Lorna O’Shea-Stebbins, thirty three, of Palm Bay, Florida. Apparently they met at a country club function in Merritt Island. Her folks are rich, but she married some loser, Jimmy Stebbins, who runs a cleaning service, former football star or something they met in high school. Anyway, as the story goes, Cogswell was home on a leave, and boom, all the sudden they were a thing. Pretty racy emails back and forth since he got back,” he said.
“Why don’t she just dump the loser, and go with the senator?” the Georgia senator said with a wry smile. All of this pleased him immensely, letting Epps know he had been there in spirit, if not in the exact same position with his own married “bombshell” in the past. But bombshells seldom settled down, as far as his or anybody’s experience went. Stansil was merely digging for the naughty parts. How seedy had the thing gotten? How many juicy details were there? Was there blackmail, some delicto-flagrante photos somewhere, and if so where were they?
“She and the loser had some sort of pre-nup and so forth,” Epps said. “He’s got her over a barrel on it. It’s airtight and that woman has a whole lot of money. Still she really digs our man here, and what’s not to like, war hero, senator, in reasonably good shape…”
“Well, well, well, it looks like we’ve found us a pocket man, from the precise county we need him to be from. Ha! He’s a gift from God above,” the senator said.
“Pocket man?”
“As long as we have this on Cogswell, and no one else does, he’s in my pocket. Nice work, Colonel. Tell Warner that seat is getting warm for him,” the senator said standing and extending his hand..
“Yes sir,” Epps said rising and clasping it for a shake.
“And Colonel Epps,” the senator said. “Why not also tell Warner he needs to find out whatever else it is the OIS has on Cogswell, just to be safe? I can’t imagine why they would be following a retired Marine colonel around before his election, unless there was something really screwy in his past, or in his service record,” the senator said.
“Like what?”
“I mean something worse than bombshell screwy. Look at that woman, there’s not a male voter on the face of this earth could blame him. Maybe there’s more to this Cogswell. I can’t imagine what it is, but maybe someone over to the OIS knows,” Stansil said.
“Neither can I, senator. We’ll see if we can find out,” Epps said picking up the photos and the file.
“Good. Good. And hey, we need to get some more quiet time on the rest of this Texas file too, so why don’t you come back today around nine or ten p.m. and we’ll huddle,” the senator said.
“Yes sir,” Epps said.
“Senator Cogswell is here, senator,” a voice in the intercom said.
“Fine show him in,” the senator intoned.

#
Sean entered the senator’s office passing a stony Air Force colonel who was on the way out. Sean took the senator’s hand.
“Sit down colonel, let’s chat a minute before we head down to lunch,” the Georgia senator said.
Remember he’s a sneaky bastard, Sean. Appear charmed, but don’t be charmed, understand?” That had been Tim’s warning.
Gus had done most of the homework on Stansil; “ he needs a military point man on the hill to push through a lot of his defense stuff. He wants a couple of pork projects for his state. He needs to steal Florida’s thunder so he will try to sweep you off your feet. But that’s perfect for us. Remember Space is your district, if he wants you to forget about your voters, he has to offer you something, and that something just might be the vice presidency,” Gus had said.
“How you finding everything, Sean?” said Stansil.
“Good!”
“Belly dancers? Limo rides? Strip clubs? Everybody show you where all them things are kept?” Stansil said.
“Man, if the voters only knew,” Sean said making a joke out of it.
“Ha-ha,” laughed Stansil. “Sean I guess you kicked some major ass over there and I can’t tell you how proud I am for you to be working with me on the subcommittee for defense intelligence spending.”
“Thank you, senator.”
“But we need to get you up to speed, and fast, Colonel. And we may even need you to polish off that Marine uniform, figuratively of course, to drive the point home!”
“Really?”
“House is getting a bill together to stop Savante’s neural desktop from becoming a worldwide reality and the trouble with all their bullshit is, we need the capabilities of this thing for our guys on the ground,” Stansil said.
“I can see why you would be concerned, senator. That does seem like a problem,” Sean said.
“Lila will send all the stuff over to your office today. Meantime, let’s grab some lunch. I could eat the ass out of a dead donkey about now,” Stansil said. “I’ll explain on the way our counterattack and see if you’re with us on this one.”
“Sounds good,” Sean said.
They got up to leave, but Stansil had another idea. He decided to drive Sean over to a fine French restaurant in downtown D.C. that was part of a congressionally funded redevelopment district, which Myles Stansil had helped push through.
“Damned democrats, all they want to do is talk a good game. D.C. was their black eye for years, and we turned it into our little victory. Got the cops extra funding they needed, got some block grant money. You know D.C. ain’t even in a state so it’s not like they can petition the governor first. It’s screwed up,” Stansil said.
“Yeah, I guess you were able to secure some more funding for inner city Atlanta too didn’t you?”
“I may be white but I still have eyes, Sean; still have eyes and I still have a soul. I can still see a city that needs work. No matter what the mayor says. He thinks he’s getting my seat two years from now, ha! Let him work his black ass off like I did,” Stansil said.
“I hope you’re not one of these PC neo-cons,” Stansil said.
“Oh hell no, Senator. It’s a new day,” said Sean, reading off the GOP’s tag line’
“No more can race policies be used to dismiss needed fiscal conservatism required to rejuvenate this country of ours. No more can divisiveness be permitted to reign supreme in the halls of congress – it’s a new day!” Sean had said, following the party line to a T.
“Tom Avery is probably the best president since Reagan, if not better,” Stansil said sadly. “That he’s also a minority pisses those people off, oooweee!, worse than a flaming bag of dog-shit left on the stoop. You know it does. They went minority with Obama? Sheeyut, we got minority too,” Stansil said.
“It’s a new day,” Sean said.
“And, unfortunately there’s no way in hell he’ll win the nomination for the 2016 election,” Stansil hissed with a sigh.
“Why not?”
“Not many people outside the beltway know about his health. He’ll be lucky to make it out this term,” Stansil said.
“It’s that bad?”
“It’s that bad. And we all know McLintock is for shit. He won’t win the nomination, what with his past and his voting record,” Stansil said.
“You’re telling me all this, why?”
“I want you to know what a fortuitous time you jumped into politics, Sean. And I want you to know what the stakes are. Everything you do will be under a microscope. All of it. Now is there anything I should know about you, as we continue on down the road of fortune, hand in hand, walking into the light of sunshine and reason that will propel this country of ours out of the dark ages?”
“You’re already writing your address?”
“Everybody’s polishing their resumes, baby. Believe it. So…?”
“Nothing jumps to mind,” Sean said a little too casually.
“Well you keep your nose clean and see that it don’t. And if it do, I want to be the first one to know about it, understand?”
“Sounds like an order,” Sean said with a smile.
“It is colonel, it is,” Stansil said. “Speaking of which, did I hear right? Did you actually demand they take back your Purple Heart?”
“I told them it needed be put on one of the graves of my guys who died,” Sean said after a moment.
“Navy Marine Corps Medal for Bravery, though. Not bad, Sean,” the senator said.
Sean’s mind wandered back to the battle region; the day when the humvee in front of him exploded. He remembered issuing orders he didn’t like but he had to do, it; “back the shit up! C’mon we’re taking rounds.”
All the dinosaurs began back tracking for more room, then Sean managed to get his vehicle turned around and he tried to convince the driver of the next vehicle in line but the kid’s mind had stalled. It was his first time in battle.
“Make the loop we got to get the fuck out of here, lieutenant. We’re trapped in a duck walk.”
The guy remained panicked, dumb-struck.
“Lieutenant, just do what we did, make the turn and follow,” Sean shouted.
The man remained locked.
“Dick, goddamnit!”
“Sir?”
“Look man, it’s a fuckin’ three point turn; from driver’s ed, remember? Reverse with hard left, hard right, then forward. That’s all it is baby! Just do it!”
And yet it hadn’t been good enough, and it was too late anyway.
“We’ve got hostiles, rooftop at two o’clock!” the gunner yelled from atop his humvee. It was a fifty cal at first and Sean’s gunner ducked, then returned fire, but the man on the roof, he changed things up on them. Two RPG’s later and hell was raining down on the convoy that was going nowhere fast.
Sean didn’t know at what point he made the decision, or how he had come to it. It seemed almost casual, the run to the doorway. He didn’t know if anyone was following him. All he knew was that he had to get that man on the roof to shut the fuck up. That’s how he thought of it.
And things just seemed to fall into place. There – a bag of rags falls to the thump of his assault rifle. There – a man gets hit in the chest and topples backwards. Sean took the steps two at the time. Had he know beforehand? There – there went another one down the hallway, falling in a heap. Sean walked on down the hall, and there – and there and damn it almost missed that one – there! Then out onto the sundeck he walked.
And the son of a bitch who had been on the fifty - but the dumb-ass ran out of ammo - was still aiming the goddamned grenade launcher down at Sean’s men. His buddy still trying to shove another rocket grenade into it, while Sean stood behind them like a schoolteacher catching two kids smoking pot behind the bleachers. Sean remained calm, cool. His mirrored shades didn’t allow the expression on his face to come through, echoing the thought; “just what the fuck do you two assholes think you’re doing, huh?” but somehow they knew.
The man holding the rocket-launcher actually turned to look at Sean as if to say ‘how the hell did you get up here so fast?’. Just before Sean put the man and his buddy down with his 45 - blam, blam, blam-blam - the man smiled, he actually smiled at the end, as if to say “isn’t this strange, American, how all of this shit is playing out?” It was an expression of resignation, commiseration, with a dash of - what was it, exactly? Was it fair to say camaraderie? - And how peculiar was it that, as Sean shot the man in the chest and in the face, he felt it too.
The stinging sound of gunfire in his ears, followed by brutal silence that rang like hell’s gong. So much mayhem. Dead bodies smelling up a hostile house outside of town Who Gives a Fuck. The stink of cordite and be-shitted rags of the dead, their last minutes of life and the associated BO lingering as a reminder anyone who walked through that these men had been alive only seconds prior. The feeling that his ears were about to start bleeding. Taking the stairs back down through that lifeless house, with eight insurgents dead in the space of a minute, all by his hand, he wanted to get out fast. He knew that their spirits were still there in that house, lingering near their bodies, confused, wandering; lamenting their own stupidity in this bloody human ritual called war. Sean didn’t want to hear their souls in his head with their warnings “all we can tell you now is, you may be next to join us! You think you are better, simply because you live still? We were wrong to hate just as you are wrong to go on with hate in your living heart…”
He didn’t even want to look at their torn and twisted forms, but his men wanted to show them to him anyway.
“Hell yeah, fuck yeah! Look at what LC Cogs’ did to these motherfuckers!” they screamed, as they pumped their fists and led him room to room. It was a good moment for them. They needed this morale booster so Sean let them have it, and lived forever after with the visions from it.
It was in that moment, Sean knew his career as a marine, was over. He used to be able to kill dispassionately to protect his men. Fire and forget. Kill, walk on, move out. Over. But now he felt passion. The white hot anger, the murder rage opened his heart to feelings of pity afterwards. The face of the man he killed. A man with a sense of humor, just like him, just like his brother Ryan had been. An enemy combatant with a sense of humor in the face of death had a worthy soul. And when you extinguished his life, the world was worth a little less after he passed, no matter what side he fought for. This wasn’t a marine thinking anymore, it was a human being.
Later, just like the night before, scorpions were trapped by two layers of masking tape near the doorway. Spiders were used for target practice with an air rifle, Camel cigarettes were stuffed into gun barrels to keep out the gunk. The stink from the latrine nearby his bunk. The way things went over there. Stuff breaking down, men breaking down, and none of it getting any better. Everyone waiting to die, kill, or go home.
But they had “gotten them some” after the humvee exploded; They said “hell yeah, fuck yeah!” and they gave him his medals, and he saluted over the gear of his fallen men whom he loved dearly, and wallowed in the pain later with no one the wiser.
Now, here sat this fat asshole complimenting him, planning on becoming president. And Sean agreed with his dead enemy, hell yeah, my friend, it is weird how all this shit is playing out.
“How were you wounded, Sean?”
“Oh yeah, that,” Sean said. “A piece of flak no bigger than a bb went into my leg beside my shin, and came out again from my calf. I stitched that up myself. They guys who bought it that day deserved it much more than I did.”
“Well we’re gonna see if we can’t bring more boys home safely Sean. More of them, and Savante’s gonna help us do it.”

Chapter 4 Flying Devil Dogs

2009-10-01T07:48:00.000-07:00

(Copyright David Anthony Kearns, Chapter 4, Book 2 of the Monster Hole series. All rights reserved and protected.)

Nov. 25, 2014 – Coleman, Texas.
Rancher Juan Mejia watched the herd in the twilight. The cattleman had four generations of experience in his blood telling him there was no one but himself and his fifty head of prize steer between here and town, a distance of some thirty miles, but something was wrong anyway. None of the longhorns were grazing or even lowing at each other. They were just standing there watching the sky, all of them facing due south as if waiting. The wind rustled through Mejia’s white-grey locks and his salt and pepper moustache. He took off his hat and swatted the giant flies away from his face so he could hear what it was that was causing his prized ganados to remain so still.
There were Texas cougars to worry about of course, coyotes, and other assorted creatures, and there were the stories, about Chupacabra out this way, but Mejia considered that superstitious nonsense. He knew better. Sure, he had had livestock go missing, had found some of his goats and sheep mangled, but the likely culprits were always commonplace in his world view. He was a down-to-earth sort of man, who kept superstitions of his culture and his job in check, lest he succumb to them and go loco. There was so much time when a man spoke to no one out here. If a mind wandered to those places, a man could start hearing things, ancestors talking to him, that sort of thing. Juan wanted nothing to do with all that. And yet it was an unexplained feeling of impending doom that caused him to unclip the holster-snap on his Colt .45 Peacemaker and keep his hand on the pearl handle of the revolver. Why had he done it? This was not like him, giving in to such “hunches” and feelings.
He was proud of that pearl handled weapon, and an excellent shot with it. He kept it mostly to protect his beloved mount from rattlesnakes. This was the first time in memory he had ever unleashed the weapon without a target already in mind.
The lights came from the south and hovered above the grass beneath a series of hillocks. They were like the sun of a new day, each of them perhaps thirty feet across and ten feet thick, solid white. Juan shielded his eyes for a second to make sure he was seeing what he was seeing. Little shadows emerged from beneath each of them. For all the world they resembled flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz. Then, away slipped the lights after dimming in intensity for a split second.
Temporarily blinded, Mejia completely un-holstered his pistol and trained it in the direction of the lights and the flying monkeys, but they had seemingly disappeared from the air. The rancher exhaled, and steadied himself with the knowledge that he had not had a drop of tequila in over seventeen years. He attended his meetings twice a week, and he had not slipped up recently. If he had just seen flying monkeys, well then he had seen them, or he had finally gone loco. He offered a quick prayer to the virgin to make the flying monkeys resolve into something more familiar.
Mejia squinted hard to see, and discovered after a moment of relief, they were not flying monkeys, after all, but small dogs of some sort. The ravenous animals, apparently a hundred or more, began scurrying back and forth in the grass, sniffing out rabbits and moles which bounded and zigzagged ahead of this mysterious pack. He shoved the image of the ovals of light to the back of his mind for later review. Right now he had cattle to protect.
Mejia wheeled his speckled mount around and galloped over to the barbed-wire fence between his herd and this menace whatever it was. The horse stopped up short and reared slightly. Mejia placed his hand on the beast’s shoulder to steady her.
“Angelina, calmate” he assured her.
He steadied the pistol again at the crook of his left elbow and fired a single round which toppled one of the dogs over backwards. He was still an excellent shot and these creatures indeed were real, and he would likely see that they were nothing more than desert coyotes as they came a bit closer.
The remaining animals stopped and looked at Mejia quizzically. One of them cocked its head, stretched its wings for a moment, refolded them and continued chewing on a prairie rat. Soon they began yelping to each other, as if discussing what to do about the rancher.
“Pues, no son perritos. Eso es ceirto.” Mejia whispered to himself.
One of the animals trotted brazenly over to the fence. Its head looked hard and knobby, covered in scales, speckled with splotches of yellow, green and tan. Its eyes were yellow with black slits over a devil smile, full of spiky fangs. The rest of it appeared to be that of a hairless coyote with the hinged wings of a giant bat.
Juan blinked, then blinked again “Hijo de la chingada! Que diablos es usted!”
It reared its head and sniffed at the herd of steers which began lowing and dipping their horns in threatening gestures backing away from the fence. The animal smiled and squeaked at its fellows making more cries that sounded like an unnamed beast somewhere on the classification scheme between a chimpanzee and wood-stork. The little animal initially gave Juan Mejia no more notice than a tumble-weed. So Mejia, very carefully, furtively raised the pistol to squeeze off another shot but the winged devil was upon him in an instant, gnawing on his arm and clawing at his face before he could pull the trigger.
The gun discharged as he fell from his mount and dozens of the little creatures lifted off from the ground over the fence and began to set in on the herd. It didn’t take long. They tore out great pieces of flesh from the animals which fell one by one, and gorged themselves on blood, filling sack-like, red pouches along their necks before trotting away. Juan lifted himself from the prone position in time to see them all take flight again into the twilight sky banking toward the west.
Bleeding, but alive, the rancher managed to get up and stagger to his mount. Strangely enough the horse wasn’t harmed in the slightest. Mejia, slumped over the saddle, trotted the mare back to his ranch, praying he would reach home before his heart failed.

Rosa had known something was wrong when he returned through sage and dusk without the herd. The dogs wouldn’t let him alone, another bad sign; they mothered over him, licked his face and wounds as he slumped from his horse and collapsed on the ground near the family picnic table.
Rosa contacted the sheriff’s department on her cell, fearing that her husband had been attacked by drug runners and knocked senseless. Then she called emergency services as she ran out to meet him.
He was alive but just barely. His voice was weak. His face flushed as though he was being consumed by some strange, internal fire.
“Que fue, mi amor?” she asked.
“Son animales diabolicas,” he kept repeating through rasps and coughs. “They are demons. They attacked the herd. They’re all gone!”
It didn’t take long for the ambulance to arrive, maybe fifteen minutes, but to Rosa, it seemed an eternity. Juan was placed in the back of an ambulance for the long ride to the hospital twenty miles away. She wanted to ride with him to the hospital but their grandson, Julian was inside the house sleeping. He would have to ride along with her in the family car.
Just as the ambulance left the ranch with sirens blaring, three black sedans pulled up to the entrance at the Mejia ranch and scrambled down the dusty lane to the house.
“What now?” Rosa asked.
Men got out and told Rosa they were from something called the North American Aerospace Defense Command. They needed to look around the ranch. She said she didn’t care, she needed to make calls and drive to the hospital to look after her husband.
Within an hour two helicopters had landed on the property, a hazmat tent was set up to analyze the dead livestock.
Mejia told nurses and staff at Coleman Memorial an insane story as he died of a bacterial infection that spread like lava from the gashes in his arm and cheek. He spoke of winged devils in the desert attacking and killing fifty head of cattle; he described how they seemed to speak to each other with yelps and cries; how smart they were; how strange, and of course glowing discs had deposited them on the prairie below the hills.
His wife, Rosa, arrived too late to say goodbye.
An Air Force official working for NORAD was able to glean some of the details about Mejia’s death from a few nurses and staff before the charge nurse asked him to leave. But he did get enough of it to place into a report which he shared with a colleague, an old roommate from the US Air Force Academy.

Washington D.C – OIS investigator Lt Colonel Kurt Warner USAF had seen and had heard of some wild-assed reports but this was way more than anything he had ever dealt with in his three years with the office of investigative services and ten years in Air Force counterintelligence.
He strode through the Air Force side of E-ring at the Pentagon, looking for Colonel Jason Epps.
Epps, who was also OIS, was a defense advisor to Georgia Republican Senator Myles Stansil, chairman of the defense appropriations committee. Warner had to get to Epps as soon as possible before he headed over to the hill.
“Truly strange shit, colonel. I thought you should know and advise the senator just incase this gets out,” Warner said entering Epp’s office
“What did you find out?” Epps said leaning back in his chair and raising his hands behind his head and clasping them. He did this whenever he meant to subtly deflate the junior man with an air of bemused skepticism.
“Well they found one of the creatures dead this time. The old man, a rancher named Mejia, got a round off and popped one good with a Colt .45 before they got to him,” Warner said.
“Did the rancher make it?”
“Nope. Like the others, got hit with a wicked bacterial infection of some sort. Barely lasted three hours,” Warner said.
“Tough sum bitch,” Epps said.
“What do you mean?” Warner asked.
“Three hours is in fact, a new record,” Epps said with a smile. He might have been discussing sports highlights.
“What did the creature look like?” Epps said.
“It was more than your typical, hairless coyote, a really strange case. Might be hard to cover up if it gets out, unless we make folks seem crazy,” Warner said.
“Strange? How so, Warner?”
“This thing had wings, head like a fucking iguana. The NORAD people have it. They could not be persuaded to release it,” Warner said.
“NORAD? Shit! Who let them in on this?” Epps said leaning forward. This was serious now, no frat party.
“Hey they were tracking two objects that obviously came in over the gulf, went straight for Texas even though they had been painted by ground radar,” Warner said.
“What the fuck can they be thinking?” Epps said.
The comment stunned Warner. He looked at the Air Force colonel for a second. Epps acted as if UFOs were capable of understanding and signing human treaties, or could read a roadmap – as in “now this here, is Texas, see? That’s US territory and this here this is Mexico, see? Fly above radar all you want there, but not in Texas. You know better…” or something of this nature.
“Warner!” Epps snapped.
“Sir?”
“What the fuck else you got for me?”
Warner took out a photocopy of a photograph.
“Well, a Norad guy told me, that within the dead body of the critter, they found this,” he said.
“Great what am I looking at?” Epps demanded.
From the file Warner produced three still images.
“A microchip on a tracking tab with a UPC code on it, and some Chinese characters. Looks like it came from a facility in Macao. This tag, or whatever, was buried beneath the creature’s skin, just behind its ear.”
That got Epp’s attention good. He stared straight at Warner now, intently interested.
“My source also said there were some funky looking pouches on the thing’s neck, used for collecting fluids, like maybe blood or plasma,” Warner said.
“Follows right along with the whole Chuppacabra myth, doesn’t it?” Epps marveled.
“Blood sucking, flying dogs, UFOs, the Chinese? What the hell is going on in the Southwest, colonel?” Warner said.
“You’re on a need-to-know basis, Warner and right now, you don’t need to know,” Epps said as he stood up and prepared to leave the office with the file.
“You’ll put in a good word for me with the senator?” Warner said.
Epps merely smiled a lascivious grin. He had to hurry. He didn’t have time for any pleasantries right now with the ambitious younger officer.

Chapter 3 Bubbling

2009-09-30T10:03:00.000-07:00

(Copyright David A. Kearns)

October 1, 2014 Mall of the Americas, Camaguey Cuba – Tim Stanton walked by the Savante Kiosk and shook his head. There was nothing he could do but watch as a group of high school teenagers signed up for implant plans on their government credit cards.
They were complete mobile direct systems, just like those given to on-the-go, adult corporate executives back in the United States; with a few web roots blocked for content deemed contrary to the state of course.
The Marchista government had decided to open lines of credit for all of Cuba’s young people so they too could benefit from this wonderful technology. If you were between the ages of fourteen and thirty-five, your system was bought and paid for by the new government.
Savante’s basic system did have GPS but the full wireless package was only available to a select thousand or so students who could prove excellent academic achievement. The interesting part of that plan is that it culled weaker students away from full access to content that would eventually allow those thousand to rule the rising government. Tim knew this.
Savante was everywhere now. What had started out as a convenience for home, office and car, was now wired directly into your brain and given GPS so that you were located anywhere on the planet at anytime. The freedom you gave up was – according to the advertisement – more than compensated for, by the new trend called “bubbling.”
The term was coined, as these things often happen, by some geek in a lab who watched as the first humans were linked up to this wireless neural network by means of an implant chip - slid between the skin and bone just behind the left ear - and began pointing, talking, moving documents and windows around in front of them with their fingertips.
The neural desktop, which, of course was a holographic presentation in the mind of the user, made the recipient seem like a garden-variety patient at a mental psych ward. They just sat, or stood there, typing on keys that weren’t there, laughing and chatting with no one, executing, sending files into the net, answering emails, all the while seemingly alone and with only the air they were breathing held within their hands. They “bubbled;” percolated like insane little coffee pots. As they got good at it, their motions grew more frantic and giddy.
The network made use of and interacted with brainwaves and neuromuscular responses as a means to open the simulated desktop, in translucent fashion, before the eyes of the recipient.
The system was pioneered by Carlos Mercado, the mercurial genius of Savante Systems Inc. The man who gave us home Smartlife Systems.
“Bubbling becomes your house, your car, your job…you life!” was his pitch.
Back in the states, the activity was already forming its own pseudo-language, the way texting did back in the early 2000s.
“Free-bubbling” was the term for conducting personal business while on the clock.
“My boss is on the net looking for Free-bubblers. I can’t chat, bye!”
Bubble pop-ups, and spam interrupted the flow of business; everything from Amber Alerts to NOAA weather reports to deals on frequent flier discounts jumped up into your field of vision unbidden – just like they did on regular desktops back in the 1990s – prompting cries for government regulations on the whole bubbling phenomenon.
Sons and daughters of wealthy GenXers now went to Bubble-Raves where neural enhancers, alcohol, designer drugs and thrash-hop music ran awash with channeled and programmed images from the net; blurring the lines between reality and virtual. Salon.com was already calling them “Generation Bubble.”
This was what the Marchista government wanted now for their best and brightest students. It didn’t seem to go with the whole idea of the on-going “revoluccion!” that Castro had championed; but then, that concept was so watered down now, no one cared to notice, thought Tim. As long as it remained military, with the threat of violence, interspersed with moments of vitriol spewed at the neighboring United States, and yes, there were plenty of channels for that on the net.
Tim’s cell phone whirred to life.
“Stanton,” he said.
“Tim it’s Gary Malone,” came the familiar voice from childhood.
“What’s up, Gare?”
“Remember all those reports of schizophrenia that were unexplained?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Well Jay and I have been doing some digging through the documents we received from our friends.”
There was code in the mix here, Tim knew it. He was referring to the last time they had caught government agents intentionally “cranking”: setting up a hoax scenario with regard to UFOs only to debunk it later. Jay Malone had become quite good chasing down leads for MUFON. It had become his specialty. Now when ‘Our friends’ were caught doing it, they could be blackmailed to reveal intelligence documents, some of which were real. Here came another one.
“And”
“You’re not going to …”
“I bet I will anymore,” Tim said.
“Alright, then take a look on your Blackberry. Here it comes,” he said.
“Okay I pulled up the PDF, what am I looking at…”

Quantum corruptions – in interstellar travel and, seemingly paradoxically, as one is traveling toward and area of higher gravitational density from lower gravity, one slows down with regard to one’s relative self. Just as a wave breaks upon the shore causing the back of the wave to heave itself over the front, one finds bits and pieces of oneself already extant in a spot before one arrives. The event – wherein cause is preceded by the effect – displaces or bumps, pieces of the traveler entity itself out of the space- time continuum. These nicks in the mass structure have been demonstrated to reduce the associated weight of the traveler to a miniscule degree. It is only one form of quantum corruption and a very simplified view of the phenomenon. At the cellular level, where the damage is not visibly apparent, the long-lasting effects, particularly in the reproductive outcome can be catastrophic for a species. These corruptions, it has been seen in later years are only mitigated by the most precise adjustments to velocity at increments approaching areas of increased gravitational density. Even so the adjustments do not always mitigate the problem which can persist at the molecular level and remain hidden for some weeks, months or even years to come.
Compounding this are repeated episodes of space travel at near light or post light velocities. The traveler in effect becomes a sort of petris dish of multi quantum corruptions.

“Gare, we’ve known about quantum corruptions and DNA reversal for some time. They didn’t give you anything new,” Tim said.
“Read on, Tim…”

Causal quantum psychosis (aka temporal distortion sickness) The wave phenomenon has many analogues in the quantum world involving the effects of interstellar travel, not the least of which is Temporal Distortion Sickness. Eddies, crenulations and whirlpools caused by the arrival in space time of an interstellar traveler, moving at light speed plus, has produced the feeling of déjà vu and other strange mental distortions in both the traveler and those near him. The effects can range from a mild feeling of déjà vu to psychic powers to raging psychosis brought on by the hall of mirrors effect of seeing and knowing instantly many or all possible outcomes surrounding a single event or series of events. The latter has also been called a “quantum embolism” Its effects are always devastating and permanent. The cause of course is the result of the folding and whirling of space-time to such an extent, eddies in the flow impact those near someone who has arrived from plus light-speed travel. These whirls can follow the arrivee for days, sometimes even months after. They tend to disrupt normal brain function and heighten psychic abilities at the background level. The malady is distinct from a form of quantum/space-time corruption called temporal shift distortion; wherein the sufferer, those typically in very long or high intensity space-travel environment, i.e. multi-phased light speed and plus light speed shifts, has returned to find different cause and effects results than were predicated at the jump-off point. Circumstances, from the sufferer’s point of view, have changed such that their perception of past events leading to the jump off are slightly or markedly different than those whom he or she left behind. This is a quasi-relativistic effect with no known cure in that it may indeed be based in an alteration of the traveler’s fundamental reality and not merely his brain function or perception.

“This is interesting Gary. Any idea where it comes from?” Tim said.
“It has the look and feel of a government study,” he said, haltingly. He didn’t want to go further on an open line.
“Gotcha. Lemme think about it and see what we can come up with as a CM,” Tim said.
“Right-oh, I’ll be on the landline,” Gary finished.
“Tim Out,” Tim said and hung up.
Countermeasures, everything the government did, or did not do, everything the “visitors” did or did not do, had to have countermeasures.
Sometimes the government leaked stuff to Tim’s little group to see if they had thought of anything with regard to a phenomenon. This was done through a semi-trusted source who had been caught in the Florida swamps making newspaper UFOs by the hundreds. Low tech to the extreme, the story was later debunked: just kids. They never explained of course how four thirteen year olds from Kissimmee had managed to create and light five hundred of these things one night all at precisely the same moment to maximize the visibility of the effect. No one in the mainstream media ever asked the right questions, but a source was borne when Jay tracked it down anyway.
Here they were looking for answers to the alarming number of schizophrenia cases seen in society these days. They were at a loss to explain it in conventional terms. Folks who had never manifested the sickness before were blowing up with end-stage type symptoms. And these weren’t bubble-ravers either; a healthy percentage of them were low-tech or no-tech folks who had never been on psychotropics.
Here was a possible answer: some were abductees, maybe, the study was seeming to hint; some of them had been in contact with abductees, it could also be inferred; some had been in close proximity to someone or some thing that had just made the arrival jump from deep space and that someone, or something, hadn’t been careful at all in staging the arrival so that all their quantum marbles, wakes and molecules arrived on time and without too much impact on current time space continuum.
That hinted that there may be intentional quantum pollution in the works: sort of like taking your speed boat through a bathing area so that you made sure you knocked over as many waders as possible with a nice three-foot wake.
It was also possible, that the visitors here, enlisted the help of human scientists behind the information curtain to explain what was happening to their crewmen. They could be, just that stupid. The more Tim considered it, he was of the opinion that quantum jumps into deep space and back again – at light speed plus, through worm holes or any combination of the two - must rot your brain from the inside out, especially if you’re not careful.
So this was the pay-off from one Carl Jorgensen, of Kissimmee, the man who had been given $5,000 and given the tools, the primer chord, fuses, and a whole shit-load of newspaper, and instructions by federal agents, to carry out the hoax at the behest of someone in the government, paving the way for a real event sometime in the near future.
This was interesting but it was also bullshit, a tidbit on quantum embolisms to look the other way on an obvious government program to hoax the public in advance of real events. Jay was right, thought Tim, this source needs to be burned and fast. Obviously, something real was going to happen in the swamps of Kissimmee any day now, and thwarting it would piss those things off something fierce, plus, throw them off their game, whatever it was.
Here was a chance for not only a countermeasure, but a quick jab at the enemy. He made the call back to Gary.
But it wasn’t ten minutes before he got another call from Sean Cogswell on a semi-secure line.
“Seanny boy! How goes the race.”
“Excellent Tim, excellent, a lock. Listen, I just got off the phone with Gary and I had a thought, a different one, can you pick up on my reasoning or do I need to send a kite down to you?”
A kite was a code word for a message sent in a package via snail mail, sometimes within a box of returned sail kites in an overnight from one of Tim’s other Highjump locations.
“Your reasoning, let me think for a moment, ah..”
Sean was saying to let it play out, document the upcoming Kissimmee phenomenon, and then out the hoaxer.
“Different kind of scenario to the PL’s” Tim said.
“You got it,” Sean said.
PL was also code, for the 1997 Phoenix Lights incident of 1997 where the Air Force had staged a flight of F-15s dropping flares to mimic an actual event taking place at the time; this, ostensibly, to ‘calm the masses.’
What Sean was advocating could actually prove collusion between the government and those operating UFOs.
“It would require a lot of man hours babysitting in some pretty bad conditions,” Tim said.
“That’s what they do, Tim. That’s what they live for,” Sean said, and he was right. MUFON types wouldn’t mind sitting in a swamp night after night, for a month if necessary, if the payoff was documenting something real.
“Gotcha. Yes, good call,” Tim said.
“Hey I worry about your stores in Havana and the D.R.,” Sean said.
“Well if it happens it happens,” Tim said to the threat of nationalization. “In fact, that’s already been programmed into the equation.”
“Your stock will take a hit.”
“Sure it will,” Tim said.
“But you just had your IPO, what was it, six months ago?” Sean said.
“I’ll look like just another sap with egg on his face and a story to tell. Get a few interviews on CNBC. Where I can do what, Sean?”
“Get me some national media coverage?”
“You got it, buddy,” Tim said.
When they hung up, Tim worried about listening ears, but he always did that. Did he say too much? Were there key words in the mix that would trip a greater intensity to the government’s Echelon network of ears? He practically needed a teletype in his head recording conversations so he could go back over them at leisure; and, these actually were available of course, via neural desktop and Savante Systems Inc. They were expensive but with voice recognition software, it was possible.

Chapter 2 Exotic Concepts

2009-09-30T06:34:00.000-07:00

(copyright David Anthony Kearns)

Camerdyne Systems Inc, Space Propulsions Lab. San Diego California. 10 a.m. July 22, 2013 –
“This symposium is being held for the benefit of many engineers throughout the company in conjunction with the United State’s Air Force,” said Doctor Jennifer Epstein.
She was a girl, really, who looked more like a graduate student than a tenured physics professor. Dark black hair and brown eyes, she wore jeans and a T-Shirt from a recent diving trip she had taken to Truk Lagoon.
“Ladies and gentlemen, don’t let the words “exotic concepts in propulsions” fool you. We are finding every day that they may not be as exotic as they will seem at this introductory session,” she said.
“It has long been assumed,” Jennifer continued, “That the limiting speed of light would essentially negate interstellar travel. However, new breakthroughs in technology, astronomy, physics, and quantum theory, have shown that, like any law, on any roadway, there are ways around this speed-bump in Einstein’s equations.”
An engineer in the front row raised his hand halfway through the introduction and everyone sort of slumped and sighed.
“Hello Doctor, my name is Myron Simpson, and I know I speak for many when I ask, what could possibly be the practical implications to us as engineers as we carry out our duties for the foreseeable future? You mention interstellar travel. In short I guess I am asking is, why are we here? We don’t have plans to colonize any stars in the foreseeable future, do we?” he said, then sat like a good dog.
A couple of people laughed at this, obviously annoyed, as Simpson was, to be taken away from the projects they had been working on for this symposium.
“Doctor Simpson, thank you for that question. If we can gain even one tenth of the …” she stopped abruptly, obviously rethinking her answer.
“I ask you to consider the advancements in our daily lives that were brought on by the seemingly useless task of going to the moon, landing on it, then returning: using nothing more than a tin can, a pocket calculator and a combustible fuel source. The fact we as a species achieved that enables us all to be here today,” she said.
“Now I ask you if you could hold some of those more obvious questions until the end of this first seminar. There will be plenty of time for that afterwards, just before we break for lunch,” she said.
She began by outlining the impossibility of deep space travel with an equation.
“As an object with its fuel supply, begins approaching the speed of light its mass and the mass of its fuel supply began approaching infinity,” she said.
“This is very much like a car traveling on the roadway fighting a headwind that increases directly proportional to the speed it travels. As the car speeds up, the hurricane it faces also speeded up in the opposite direction. Worse, the more the driver steps on the gas the heavier his fuel load becomes.
“Let’s solve part of the problem,” she said. “Let’s merely reduce the mass of his fuel supply to zero. Why not, we’re all engineers here, aren’t we? We can do that?”
“Impossible,” said pain in the ass man.
“Impossible?” she asked. “Not impossible at all. Here, watch me.”
And with a stroke of a pen on the overhead, she reduced the mass of the fuel supply within the equation to nothing. This zeroed out several parts of the equation and made it easier to deal with.
Pain in the ass man had more than he could take; “How?”
“Some of you were introduced to quantum physics in your studies and like me, the word ‘quantum’ threw you for a loop. Your mind shut down and you said ‘no way.’ It bespoke Gene Roddenberry and Star Trek. Your mind suffered images of Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock and Mr. Scott parked somewhere out of gas, looking for something called ‘di-lithium crystals’ and you went no further. You stole notes from anyone in your class to get through that portion of the exam and off you went with your conventional studies of physics,” she said.
Several people laughed at this.
“Suppose the fuel supply was inherent, or existed in empty space itself,” she said.
Someone else in the audience chimed in “Zero Point Energy!”
“Precisely right,” she said, adding; “And you should not be surprised to learn, by reading your programs today, as I am sure all of you have...”
Small clutches of laughter erupted. Most had not done so. Zero-Point Energy was the first on the list of topics before lunch.
“…that this kind of energy exists everywhere between stars across empty space, and between water molecules in a cup of coffee. In fact, during the 1960s Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman and one of Einstein’s protégé’s John Wheeler, proved that there was enough energy in that cup of coffee you had this morning to boil all the water in the world’s oceans,” she said.
“This energy, in a practical sense, in a classic physics setting, is nearly impossible to measure. But the more physicists sought to eliminate it from equations over the years, the more it became apparent that it was real. So physics went the other way; they began to account for it, and guess what, it can be measured. As we know from engineering if a force can be measured, it can be what?”
“Harnessed,” someone said.
“And the more it can be predicted if one knows the angles between atoms and molecules in a pure substance,” she said.
Someone had a point here. Obviously the hold-questions-until-later caveat was designed only to thwart Pain in the Ass Man at the outset.
“The force you are referring to is sometimes misidentified as the Casimir force, the attractive force between to plates over empty space that would somehow be turned outward in a vacuum. Wasn’t it demonstrated, that this would be impractical, in that you only get one use out of one of the plates before the engine is useless?”
“Yes, it was,” she said. “Which brings us back to our cup of coffee and all the unseen quantum energy contained between all those water molecules. What happens to the water as it freezes?”
“The structure becomes crystalline,” Gus answered.
“Correct, the molecule arranges itself at known angles with respect to one another, and we know precisely what those angles are, don’t we? The forces of which I speak become more quantifiable, the lower the temperature of the water, becoming most ordered at absolute zero, otherwise known as negative 273 degrees Celsius. They no longer appear random, nor do they cancel each other out in that random soup. The lower the temperature, the more ordered the arrangement, and for our purposes, the more ordered the resultant energy vector.”
“But water in a coffee cup has impurities in it,” said Pain in the Ass Man.
“Fine,” she said. “Refine the fuel source. Where do we find water in its purest state?”
One person said ice and another said steam.
“Both correct,” she said.
“The film clip you are about to see comes to us from an unknown source in Mexico. Obviously, the film is a hoax, but it brings up some important points, namely, those perpetuating the hoax were onto something,” she said.
Lights dimmed in the amphitheater as a screen descended from above the stage.
“These images were shot with a garden-variety, digital, home movie camera. The U.S. Air Force concedes that while evidence for tampering was minimal, the short length of the film combined with unexplained shadows indicates creative use of software, producing this image. The mountain is Popocatepetl an active volcano outside Mexico City and the second highest peak in the country at eighteen-thousand feet. As the caldera heats up, the ice from the mountain falls in and coverts instantly to steam. Our photographer was apparently on hand to witness a minor eruption as it started.
“Watch the steam column now rising from the caldera just before the eruption,” she said.
A small white light dashed from out of the clear sky and repeatedly dove into and out of the steam, circling back again and again like a moth circling a dancing candle flame. When the full spout of volcanic material began, the object sped off out of sight.
Lights in the theatre went up.
“The clip is only twenty seconds long. Whoever made this video was familiar with what we in this room are now talking about. And at this juncture, I ask you to not let this generate a lengthy, boring discussion about the existence or non-existence of flying saucers. The point is, someone else has been doing their homework and thought to have a bit of fun with it. How would such objects power themselves? Zero-Point Energy, from the water molecule is a viable resource,” she said.
“Say our hypothetic craft only collected two coffee-cups worth of pure water. It would have the energy required to zip back to the planet Klingon if it so desired,” she said.
“Doctor, the question of the mass of the craft itself has not been eliminated from your equations,” chimed another bright bulb.
“Good point. Let’s say the object weighs a ton. Say it only powers up to the point of one tenth the speed of light. It’s still is a hell of a lot farther along from here to the nearest star than any conventional spacecraft,” she said, erasing her notes and starting again with a more simplified equation.
“By those numbers, and substituting the distance between us and the nearest star here, we see that, it arrives here from planet Crouton in the region of Proxima, in thirty years, instead of nearly thirty-thousand,” she said and demonstrated.
“Granted all of this is speculative on coming up with the technology which brings up why you are here,” she said.
“What about inertial effects. Nothing could survive the movements demonstrated by that craft. The g forces alone would be so intense an occupant would become bug-spatter in what we’ve just seen?” a man in the center of the audience asked.
She merely shrugged.
“Say there are no living occupants. Say this is a reconnaissance drone from the planet Crouton. Now what? Further still, say you can cancel the forces of inertia with some sort of inertial dampening force, like the shocks in your Honda. Now what?”
“That would require a hell of a lot of energy and mass to create such a dampening force,” he said.
“Okay….” She paused, obviously choosing her words very carefully here. “Let’s say you have a way to knock your mass out of phase with regard to the temporal and gravitational frame of reference, sort of like the way you switch radio stations. Now the inertial effects are zero.”
“That’s a neat trick. How do you do that?” the man asked and everyone laughed.
“That’s for this afternoon’s discussion,” she said with a smile
The man said nothing.
“The point I am trying to make this morning is, if you can harness this energy source for propulsion, you can also use it to dampen, to cancel itself out, whenever you need to, and for our purposes you would have to,” she said.
“How would you harness this force?” Pain in the Ass Man asked.
“Fortunately ladies and gentlemen, those are questions that are more in your purview as practical engineer-scientists. Your job is to come up with those answers. My realm is the theoretical and, I am here to tell you, it is more than theoretically possible to produce the kind of propulsion just seen in this hoax video using what we know, using not-so-out-of-the-way physics, chemistry, and mathematics. Thank you, we’ll take a ten minute coffee break,” she said.
The camera continued to record. The faces all around the room were bright with astonishment. They had never seen anything like that craft moving inside the volcano caldera, and somehow they knew the image wasn’t faked.
Her discussion about knocking matter out of phase was being mumbled about all over the room. Obviously the young woman was privy to a great deal of information.
The film ended and Tim stood at the front of the room.
“You may not know this Sean but your father was involved in the study of these things. He was also involved in recording UFO events at the Cape for reasons I will explain to you later.”
“One of his best friends, Dr. James McDonald wrote this to the Secretary General of the United Nations,” Tim said and an image of part of the document was shown on the wall.
“…I stress also the fact that there are innumerable facets of the UFO phenomena which I can only describe as highly strange and unexplainable in terms of the scientific and technological knowledge of today. I would also like to point out that, if these objects are not extraterrestrial origin, then the mutually exclusive assumptions which would be necessary to account for them would be even odder, and perhaps of an even greater scientific interest for humanity. Therefore, regardless of what ultimate explanation is found for the UFO phenomena, the present scientific neglect and ridicule must be replaced by scientific concern and intensive study. My recommendation to the Outer Space Affairs Group is that it seek all possible means of securing worldwide attention to this problem.”

“McDonald was found dead outside Tucson, Arizona with a bullet in his head, much the way your brother was,” Tim said. “Like your brother in 2011, they called Dr. McDonald’s death in 1971, a suicide.”
“Point taken,” Sean said.
“These are the documents Ryan left for us on the roof of his room in your boyhood home,” Tim said clicking a button using a hand-held mouse. There were hundreds of images of the Mayan glyphs, of future predictions, or instructions.
“During the time of Ryan’s funeral many memories surfaced of an event that took place in Melbourne Beach back in 1981. This event included contact between myself, your brother, and a species foreign to our own. Our neighbor Myles Neiderman died as a result. Shortly after Ryan’s funeral in 2011 Myles’s brother attempted to kill me and you, thankfully, intervened,” Tim said.
“We have since discovered a few things,” Tim said.
“Such as?”
Gus stepped up and the next slide on the presentation was visible.
“We know that these so-called aliens are either using Antarctica as a base or they evolved there as a separate species from our own. We think the latter may be the answer or at least part of the overall picture,” Gus said.
“A separate species?”
“Reptilian. It explains a few things which we will be talking about,” Gus said.
“They have thoroughly infiltrated our military industrial complex by way of stoking human on human conflict. They have been doing this for ages,” Gus said.
“What’s with the Mayan stuff?”
“I was getting to that, Sean,” Gus said. “What we call Mayan writing can actually be traced to another Native American culture which emerged on the Bahama Banks some 15,000 years ago. These people not only developed a system of writing but a calendar which was shared with nearly all of Mesoamerica.”
“Their civilization was wiped out by rising sea levels and contact with our friends the aliens who appeared to them as some sort of reptile and bird composite creature that was revered for its wisdom,” Gus said.
“The remnants of that culture spread to and mixed with Central American cultures and here in Florida. But sea level kept rising,” Gus said.
The image changed to a series of underwater shots.
“These pictures were taken by our buddy Gary Malone, Sean, the day we put you on the plane heading back to Afghanistan,” Tim said. “They are of a temple complex that existed five miles off shore of our former hometown. They were built by those Native Americans who fled the destruction of what we would call, Atlantis. To them it was called Aztlan,” Tim finished.
“Holy shit,” Sean said.
“That’s usually the first reaction,” Tim said.
“So Atlantis is real?”
“Was real. Two large islands Aztlan and Posaztlan existed side by side. The native peoples were protected from many hazards other Native American cultures faced; large predators, and cold climates to name two. They developed a huge civilization that influenced the entire world. When they became too advanced, they ran into our friends, whom we would call aliens.
“A few theorists have posed that these native peoples were aided by the alien race when in fact the opposite is true. They were eventually destroyed by them and the aliens went right on chasing their descendants trying to wipe out all knowledge of their existence.”
“Why?”
“So they can do this again, and again, for as long as they need to. So they can use our DNA at their leisure; so they can use our nimble minds to solve problems for them. So we can build their spaceships, their satellites, their weapons and then go back to the stone age whenever they don’t need us for a while. They are a true parasite if there ever was one.”
“Now we know the creatures have been coming to these beaches here every thirty years to extract sea turtle DNA for their breeding program. They have also been extracting human DNA.”
“Take pride in this Sean; Your brother Ryan discovered all of this. He also discovered his company was working on several projects in concert with these beings. Several of these related to a stock inventory program, satellite communications, and the genetics end of their operation. He also discovered that they have a timetable for taking mankind back to the stone age,” Tim said.
“This isn’t the first time this has happened,” Gus added.
“We mean to stop it, before it can happen again,” Tim concluded.
“Jesus,” Sean said to all of this. “What has prevented all of this from getting out? Why don’t people know about all of this? It’s just so hard to believe!”
“Your father’s colleague, Dr. McDonald, had a term for what has been happening to us most recently. He called it the ‘lid of ridicule,’” Gus said.
“An institutionalized, widely-accepted disparagement of the entire phenomenon,” Gus continued. “That started with Project Blue Book and the Condon Report.”
Tim continued here; “People say, ‘if it’s really happening, prove it.’ So you show them overwhelming proof, and they go silent for a minute, then they say ‘why haven’t I seen one?’”
“And you say, ‘wait a minute, you just said show you incontrovertible proof and I did! What about that?’ and they say ‘hell I still don’t believe it. It’s crazy’”
“Crazy because our society has been condition to accept that it’s crazy. The neat part about this trick is, it has taught us to accept that if we even entertain the notion that this is happening, we must also be crazy,” Gus continued.
“Our government, which has been charged with protecting us, and keeping us all healthy and happy, has taught us that if we even investigate a scientific phenomenon, as is the right of every sentient being, we are mentally ill. And in so doing, the government has, in many cases, prompted and promoted mental illness in those who have been innocent witnesses to the phenomenon,” Gus said.
“Imagine any other scientific phenomenon, such as icebergs, Sean, or penguins or tornados. Imagine how unhealthy and malicious it would be for the government to turn a blind eye toward these, meanwhile controlling the media and the public, exuding them to consider themselves unfit to lead normal lives just because they had seen and reported on a tornado. How immoral would that be? How sinister? How detrimental?” Gus said.
“I guess the idea in the case of UFOs, might be to prevent panic?” Sean said.
“Aren’t tornadoes dangerous?” Gus asked. “Isn’t it a natural human response to fear a tornado and get out of its way?”
“True,” Sean said.
“So, if the government were doing something that made you doubt what you were seeing and hearing was a tornado, so much so that you attempted to stick out your hand to verify what you were seeing was real, would that be a moral thing for them to do?” Gus continued.
“Point taken,” Sean said.
“…But?” Gus asked. “Point taken, but you still don’t believe it?”
“That’s not it. A tornado doesn’t threaten the foundations of entire religious systems and world commerce, markets, banking, so on and so forth. The mantle of obfuscation of which you speak might just have a purpose, Gus, of protecting ourselves from worldwide collapse,” Sean continued.
“Good point, Sean. Worldwide collapse is bad. That’s no something we want,” Gus said.
“…But?”
“It just so happens that this is precisely what our little friends have in mind for our immediate future,” Gus said.
“That I would like to see proof of, if you have it,” Sean said.
“All we have is their past behavior to go by, Sean. They certainly aren’t going to go emailing us an itinerary,” Gus said.
“Okay, I’m gonna ask this question,” said Sean, “And obviously you’ve already got an answer to it but I’m gonna ask anyway; why haven’t I ever seen one of these things?”
“Doctor Epstein would you care to address that for Sean?”
“We’ve seen a few advances in our own technology recently, Sean. You’ll recall talk of a disastrous experiment called The Philadelphia Experiment?”
“Yeah, I seem to remember something by that name,” he said.
“It was an effort during the 1940s by the US Navy to cloak an entire battle ship using electromagnetic effects. It only half worked because what the Navy had done, in my opinion was partially knock the ship out of phase with regard to space-time; something these creatures have learned to do and can do it quite well,” she said.
“A more simple and direct method for cloaking is by the use of standing sound waves which can cause air molecules to resonate, or hum, at certain frequencies. Air carries a specific refractive index. If you cause the molecules of air to vibrate you change the refractive index. You do it enough and…”
Gus added; “you cause the light to bend right around the object you are attempting to conceal.”
“So you throw a switch in the cockpit and the object disappears,” Sean said.
“Precisely,” Gus added. “Which is the very least these creatures can do using lasers, time jumps and some of their other powers.”
“Meaning what?”
“Psychic abilities. Put it all together and they can shape shift, or appear to be in multiple places at once. They can change the shape, size and dimensions of their craft. They can carry zero space forward into another dimension; create space outside of space and insert it into a new time-space frame of reference; creating the ultimate “Clown Car” scenario,” Jennifer said.
“Well this all sounds to me as though he battle is lost,” Sean said. “How can we fight something that has these capabilities?”
“Your brother thought long and hard on that one Sean and his answer, which happens to be our answer, is quite simply, we must. Our right to exist as a species has been called into question. If we continuously allow our species to be domesticated by these things, our fate will be no better than that of livestock. The end result is precisely the same, or worse,” Gus said.
“Fighting something that can do these things seems an awful tall order Gus,” Sean said.
“Maybe not,” offered Jennifer cheerily. “ That we begin to understand how these things are accomplished, in their efforts to train our respective militaries, we begin to see their methods aren’t that difficult to master using state of the art physics and math.”
“Us? Whizzing around in flying saucers?” Sean responded to this.
“Maybe,” she said with a smile.
“Maybe there are other methods we can adopt in the meantime which would be even more helpful, decidedly human methods,” Gus said.
“Like?”
“When faced with superior firepower and even superior numbers, the underdog has prevailed against invaders before. I give you any number of examples from Roman times to the Sandinistas to the revolution which produced a free Irish Republic,” Wellington chimed in.
“We become the IRA to these things?”
“It’s what your brother advocated,” Gus said. “Ours is not a non-violent revolution.”
“Okay, why not?”
“We anticipate a complete lack of empathy on the part of the invader, toward the human condition,” Wellington said.
“You mean, they don’t give a shit,” Sean said.
“Correct. And why should they, they might not even possess what we humans would call a soul. Certainly their actions reflect a lack of empathy for any rights of those whom they abduct. There is absolutely no effort on their part to communicate from an equal footing with us, to even present us with a list of demands. They want us caged up, used for their breeding program, or enslaved in their factories; failing that they want us dead,” Gus said.
Sean blew out his breath.
“Un-fucking believeable. I come home, to this,” he said.
“Sean, force is the only thing that we think will bring these creatures to the table of negotiations so we can even discuss with them, what it is precisely they want with our planet and us,” Tim said.
“You’ve asked them, have you?”
“Sean, face it, we’re the Apaches here, the Navajo, the Lakota, get the picture? Did talking with pale face keep those folks off the rez?”
Sean said nothing.
“It’s not as though we’ve been hiding from them and preventing them from communicating with us. The opposite is true. They show up where they want, when they want, they ask no permission for the things they do to us. They’ve made no attempt to communicate their needs to humanity at large,” Gus said.
“Force should be the last option when dealing with an enemy of superior capabilities or armaments,” Sean said, as though quoting from a book.
“Well, how should it be?” Gus said. “What would you have us do?”
Sean exhaled. He didn’t immediately answer but he gave some of his thoughts.
“You have to stage things, when dealing with such an enemy. In some ways you have to let him feel comfortable that he’s already won…”
“Like what was done to you guys, over there,” Gus said.
In an instant Sean was lost in thought. His eyes went hazy.
He was reliving the horrific moments after an IED exploded under a humvee, the carnage and mayhem. He was hearing the sounds of high velocity rounds slamming into plate armor on the sides of his own truck.
After the explosion he had jumped out and began running toward where his men had fallen. That had been a mistake. Rounds peppered the ground around him. He ran back and forth like a cat caught in traffic. After seconds that seemed like hours, he found himself crouched down into a hole filled with burning bits of debris from the vehicle that had gotten it. The torso of a man shared this little fox hole, letting him know they were all gone. The men in this vehicle were all dead. Not one of the five had anything left of them.
The thumping from a fifty caliber machine gun had brought him back to reality and gave him cover to get back into his own transport. He had issued orders. He didn’t like them, but they were caught in a canyon of buildings. They had to turn themselves around and go back the way they came in. They had to leave the remains of their dead buddies behind.
“You have to keep your enemy from watching your movements,” Sean said at last. “You have to blend in with whatever cover you have at your disposal. You have to use his strengths against him, make them your strengths.”
“I don’t know if Americans have it in them to fight that kind of war,” he said. “It requires a lot of sacrifice.”
Gus nodded to Gary who, along with several others brought boxes of materials out of the garage.
“Faithfully reproduced for your benefit, Sean,” Tim said. “Everything your dad and Ryan had collected over the years. The whole story, all the information you would need about this particular enemy.”
“There are several groups we can begin to look at for methodology, Gus,” Sean said. “Let’s draw up a list of prisons across the country. I want to know who every shot-caller is in every major federal penitentiary.”
“Why?”
“There’s an example for you. I’ve always wondered how they do it. How they manage to communicate prison-to-prison with so many people watching them.”
“Working with prisoners?” Wellington said.
“This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, this ain’t no fooling around,” Sean said, quoting an old song.
“Ain’t that the truth,” Gus said, “Any other ideas for the moment?”
“We need to be in contact with groups that keep a low profile. And by that I don’t mean religious groups, nor crime syndicates, per say, but some fraternal organizations, groups that do community work, but no one with special causes, nor axes to grind.”
“What about the UFO groups?” Gus asked.
“No offense to MUFON just now. A smart enemy will have anticipated the movements of his foe before he makes them. That’s the first place they’ll look for us. They probably have a host of those groups already infiltrated. Not that we can’t use those groups for our own efforts, but right now, this network needs a backbone, and we have to find one that’s secure, that’s untouched, virgin,” Sean said.
“I’ll see what we can come up with,” Tim said.
“Now I suppose I should look over all this stuff,” Sean said.“You have until morning. Then we have to get you back to your hotel room,” Gus said.

Chapter 1 Homecoming

2009-09-29T07:06:00.001-07:00

By David Anthony Kearns

(Commercial reuse prohibited: Concepts, characters, storyline, dialogue is the coin of the mind of author David Anthony Kearns; sole owner of contents of this blog and all others listed in blogger profile. Commercial reuse or reprint in webspace, in printed material, within film or television venues constitutes copyright infringement and will be prosecuted legally)

The book, along with the first book in this trilogy, Monster Hole, is being published on the web for the pure enjoyment, entertainment, edification of the READER. That is to include every sentient member of the human species and other parties who may be so inclined to know we are aware of your presence. This book is an attempt to understand who you are and what precisely it is you want from us. In that your answer to this question is silence and evasion, one reasonably concludes your intent is HOSTILE!

Queries, comments welcome by one and all at the end of every chapter.

The Big Lie
Book 2: Monster Hole Series

It will spread like a sickness, infecting every system of human endeavor, until such time as they are enveloped and surrounded by it. It will become vital and necessary for the uplift of human institutions, while it is sucking the very lifeblood of freedom from them. In the end, they will not know where it ends, and they begin.
- The Oracle of Pantech

2014 Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton Ohio - Dr. Jeremy Sullivan sat in the computer lab with his close associate Dr. Dan Burnside.
“Burnside, let’s go over this again.”
“Look, Corso laid it all out for us in his book and this proves it, strange as it may seem. You know, it’s fiber optics, it’s semi-conductors, it’s cache memory, and random access, it’s genetics, bionics, all of that was found at Roswell,” Burnside said.
“Apart from any meaningful propulsion system,” Sullivan said.
“Right Jeremy, which means what?”
“I’m still not following you?”
“It’s a burnt offering. It was given to us. Not something we found, or even shot down. Can a Raptor even keep up with one of these things, today?”
“No.”
“And yet one of good ole Verner Van Braun’s V-2s at White Sands knocks one out of these babies from the sky, and oops something similar happens at Roswell?” Burnside said.
“….I’ll agree, Dan. This wouldn’t seem to make any sense, but what are you proposing?”
“Look at what the oracle was telling us. Read these symbols again,” Burnside said.
“I have read them. I’m still not sure…”
“These things were thrown at us, like spaghetti on a wall. They were hurling them at us, all but screaming ‘looky here! Here’s another one, you crazy-assed chimpanzees!’
“You’re essentially saying …”
“Combine this data with those kooky sightings in the 1950s; men in shiny suits collecting samples with little beakers, then turning in surprise, like ‘Ooops! Shit guys, the monkeys have seen us, run!’”
“Artificial…”
“Stage drama, a cartoon they kept repeating until we…”
“You’re telling me, you think that these things, whoever they are, knew we would take all this material they crashed and begin messing with it, to come up with, say, the internet?” Sullivan said.
“….call me loony if you will, this is THE, repeat THE logical explanation...”
“Glad you realize how crazy it sounds, Dan,” Sullivan said.
“Jeremy, think of where you were and what you were doing, two years ago. Did you ever dream in your wildest moment, you’d find yourself here today, doing this, knowing what you now know?”
Sullivan sucked on his teeth and winced. The man had a point there.
“I just wish we could see the rest of that cave. Get the rest of the text from the wall,” Sullivan said at last.
“Think of it, an entire ancient Native American culture co-opted by the United States Air Force,” Burnside said.
“Shhhhhh…” Sullivan said, nodding toward the camera to his right, mounted above the door.

#
June 3, 2014 Melbourne International Airport - When Lt. Colonel Sean Cogswell, USMC (Rt.) de-boarded Flight 973 from Baghdad via Munich, he was exhausted. Tim could see that much.
But he looked fit. His eyes carried the steady, hawkish gaze of someone taking a survey of the room for potential enemies. When they landed on Tim’s face they softened immediately.
“Hey man,” said Sean walking over to his brother’s best friend attempting to give him a bear hug.
“Holy shit, is it ever good to see you,” Tim said, staving off the hug.
“I didn’t think you’d be here. I’m hearing so many things about you these days. It’s hard to sieve truth from fiction.”
“That’s by design. I’ve picked up a few new enemies since I saw you last,” Tim said.
“So I hear,” Sean said. “I suppose one of these days you’re going to tell me exactly what the hell has been going on.”
“That day has arrived, Sean. But there’s time enough for that. Let’s get your gear squared away in the back of my limo,” Tim said.
“Your what?”
It was then Sean noticed Tim’s curious garb. He had been dressed more like a mortician than anything else.
Tim completed the act by donning a chauffeur’s cap.
“Oh my God. You’re serious,” he said.
“Yes sir, colonel. Right this way!” Tim said loudly “Yeah and you might just have blown my cover,” Tim said sotto voce as they walked to the baggage claim and grabbed the olive drab hang-bag carrying Sean’s dress blues.
“Is this it?” Tim asked.
“Most of my life has been carry-on since I returned my weapon to the armory,” Sean said. “That and a sea of fucking paper-work that I am finally finished with.”
They walked through the busy airport lobby. Tim played his part dutifully carrying both the hang bag and the wheeled carry-on for Sean.
Through his darkened lenses, Tim looked up at CNN internet news blaring from one of the frame plasma screens hanging over the sushi lunch cart where six or eight businessmen shoveled marisco wonders into their mouths before their flights.
Deposed former Cuban president Raul Castro had been assassinated earlier in the day by the Marchistas but, no one was admitting who precisely had done the killing. A special session of the Revolutionary Parliament was set for tomorrow to decide the fate of Cuba. Its brief, two year taste of pseudo-freedom was drawing to a close, thought Tim.
At least three of the businessmen were now staring intently up at the screen, realizing that their first class return tickets might not be worth a damn if La Habana Airlines – which had been doing extremely well in recent years – was nationalized by the time they touched down. To go or not to go?
Here it comes, thought Tim. Game on.
“Where to, driver?” Sean asked.
“Somewhere safe, where you can be briefed,” whispered Tim as he ushered Sean to the limo door.
“Briefed?”
“Briefed,” said Tim in utter seriousness.
Sean sat down in the back.
“Thought I was through with being briefed,” Sean complained.
“Everything back there is for your personal use, Sean. Everything,” Tim said.
Sean looked around. He had a holo-tube at the ready at the touch of a button, a glass of Scotch and a Cojimar. After lighting the cigar he partially rolled down the window which rolled right back up. He looked into the rear view mirror to see Tim shake his head in the negative; that had been a mistake. Instead, the overhead glass slid back slightly letting the sweet smoke escape through the late afternoon breeze.
“Kick back, have a drink,” Tim said.
“I was thinking about it,” Sean said.
It was clouding up to the west.
“Rain, or it’s getting ready to,” Sean said.
“You were thinking of paddling out?”
“Yeah…have to admit I was thinking about that too,” Sean said.
“It’s been so flat recently. Only means one thing,” Tim said.
“Storms in August. Look out,” Sean said.
“Got that right, brah.”
Sean watched CNN again on the holovision as the report on Cuba continued. Tim had been listening to it.
“What a fucking mess,” Sean said taking a sip of Scotch.
“Today or tomorrow Cuba will dissolve its congress and wipe away any pretense,” Tim said. “Marchistas will insert their candidate and Cubazuela will take its place among the nations of the earth.”
“And you think this is what they will really call it?”
“Who knows, Sean. Maybe they’ll go back to the Sovietsky way; something really long, and radical just to piss us off.”
“I hear they got Chinese diplomats all set up, ready to go, ready to recognize them at the UN.”
“So you have been watching.”
“A little,” said Sean
“Then that’s good. This is going to be a big deal in the upcoming election here, Sean. You have to know how to react to it,” Tim said.
“Election?”
“Indeed Senator, otherwise, how will you become one?” Tim said.
“Oh shit.”
“Lot of catching up to do, Sean. A lot,” Tim said.
“And here I thought I was my own boss,” Sean said.
“Everyone feels confident that once you hear what we have been hiding from you for the last few years, you’re going to come to the conclusion you have to do something to help,” Tim said.
“And fortunately for me, my manner of doing so has been all mapped out for me,” Sean said.
“Since the day you saved my life, you’ve been an integral part of this,” Tim said.
“I just haven’t known it,” Sean said with a bemused smile.
Tim nodded; “Precisely.”
A light drizzle turned the streets glassy. The steamy hiss of cars slicing through puddles could be heard. The limo headed east, turned south and glided down Babcock Street missing the 192 interchange for A1A beachside.
“What gives?”
“Your house in Melbourne Beach is bugged to shit,” Tim said.
“Bugged?”
“Since before your mom died. They wired that place up like a zip-lined jungle. But that’s alright, we want it that way,” Tim said.
“Wired? Who wired it?”
“Feds, goons, MIBs, NSA, CIA, FBIs….all the letters of the alphabet,” Tim said. “You’ll see soon enough.”
“You’ve been watching the news lately?” Tim asked.
“Here and there, when I can,” he replied.
“You’ve heard of the cryptos?” Tim asked.
“No, can’t say as I have. What’s a crypto, something you smoke?”
“Funny. Good one. Keep that response for now. It suits you,” Tim said.
“Why would someone ask me about crytpos?”
“Because of Ryan and his associations. They’ll want to link you to them, right away. To discredit you as a candidate,” Tim said.
“But what are they?”
“Cryptomorphs; you know, chupacabra, Big Foot, mothman; that sort of thing,” Tim said.
“Ryan was looking into this?” he said rather incredulously.
“Ryan was helping design them. His software was being used as a means to construct them. One of the things he found out,” Tim said.
“Cryptos…yeah, you know, Tim? I’m wondering if there isn’t a better time to introduce me to all this stuff? I’ve kinda been through a lot in the last few days?”
“I know, Sean. I am sorry. I wish there was another way,” Tim said shaking his head.
What really sucked about the Big Lie, was, every time you found someone new you wanted to bring into the underground you have to go all the way back to the drawing board with the new guy. Including that troublesome phase where you had to prove to them you weren’t crazy and you weren’t full of shit. You had to audition the information, fight it like case-law; justify it like an expense report. It was frustrating as hell.
It made it very hard to get anything in the way of forward progress when it came to understanding these things.
Ryan never had to train, recruit and do background checks. But it would have been good to have Ryan here now for his scientific mind. Sean might be an excellent leader, just like everyone thought he would be. But did he have his older brother’s mind for science? Who knew?
And with that began a labyrinthine effort to shake any surveillance on the limousine involving a circumlocution of five blocks of downtown Palm Bay.
That completed, they drove to the Ramada Inn located at the intersection of I-95 and Palm Bay Road. There they were met by a cab parked beneath the alcove.
“You are to get out of the car, greet the woman who steps out of the cab,” Tim said. “Then you two are to ascend the elevator to room 422.”
“Ascend?”
“Don’t be a wise ass, this is serious,” Tim said.
“So I gather,” Sean said.
Sean looked at the woman in the white sequin dress and high heels standing on the curb now waiving to him.
“Who the hell is she?”
“A paid actress,” Tim said.
“….That’s too bad. She’s pretty hot,” Sean said.
“Seanny, we don’t have much time, man. I wouldn’t ask you to do this if it wasn’t crucial,” Tim said.
“I can see your point,” Sean said.
“How?”
“Same Crown Vic that was parked outside the airport is right over there. It just pulled up,” Sean said.
“Damn, they’re not even trying to be discreet about it. Not good,” said Tim. “Look, dig into your wallet and hand me some cash, alright? Then get moving.”
“Alright…”
“Try to act a little drunk when you get out. Sell it hard,” Tim said attempting to hand Sean some change.
“Keep it buddy. I just came back from the wars,” Sean said.
Tim popped the trunk and handed him his carry-on and his hang bag.
Tim then handed Sean the card key to the room.
Sean held a cigar in his hands, loosened his tie and walked unsteadily across the alcove toward the beautiful woman in the white dress. He slipped his hand around her waist, kissed her on the cheek and they moved through the front doors and to the elevators.
They exchanged small talk the way lovers would.
“How have you been?”
“Dying to see you,” she said.
“Really? Are you sure?”
“After you didn’t call me I was worried,” she said.
“It’s been so hectic over there,” he said, marveling silently at what a good actress she was.
Once inside the elevator she held her fingers to her lips. Then she leaned in and kissed him, hard.
Amused at his predicament, Sean kissed her right back. She smelled heavenly whoever she was. It was seriously turning him on.
“They’ll eventually be checking the security cameras,” she whispered to him.
“Then why not give them something to talk about,” he whispered pushing the stop button.
The tinny sound of the alarm echoed off the walls of the elevator shaft as he descended her neckline with kisses.
“Don’t be a bastard,” she whispered.
“Lady, in five years, the closest thing to an eligible female I’ve seen, had humps on it,” he said.
She pushed another button on the wall and the elevator began to move again.
“Let’s wait ‘till we get to the room, darling,” she said.
“Fine by me,” he said.
They entered the room and the woman immediately turned around a slapped Sean.
“Asshole,” she whispered.
He stood there for a moment rubbing his cheek. She smiled and so did he.
They were all over each other in a matter of seconds. By the time the knock came to the door, he had nearly stripped his shirt off.
“Go see who it is,” she said hitching up her dress.
The door opened to reveal a bell-hop with a dinner cart, the top of which was brimming with plates as well as an icy silver bucket with a bottle of chilled Moet stuffed into it.
As the door closed the bellhop began issuing orders.
“Get the plates off quickly.”
He lifted the skirting around the cart to reveal a space where Sean was to crawl for his exit from the room. He looked over at the blonde who smiled sheepishly and shrugged.
“Damn it, I was just beginning to like her,” he said.
“It’ll have to wait,” said the bellhop sardonically.
The bellhop wheeled the cart, now containing Sean, hunched over in a ball. They rolled out of the room and down the hall to a service elevator. From there the elevator descended to the kitchen. Sean could see the stained linoleum tile of the kitchen moving beneath the wheels of the cart but not much else. He fought hard to suppress his laughter. This was either very serious or the most elaborate welcome home gag he had ever heard of.
The cart negotiated a bump then traveled down a receiving area access ramp to garage beneath the building. The skirt came up to reveal a van from Germann’s Cleaning Service waiting for him.
Sean stood up unsteadily, dizzy for a moment, when a driver told him to get into the back of the van.
“Can someone please tell me…?”
“There’s no time, Sean. Move. We’ve been setting this up for months now. Don’t blow it,” the man said ushering him with shoves.
Sean complied and within seconds he was in the back of the empty van holding on to the walls while it traveled up and out of the garage and back onto the main streets of the city.
“Welcome home, Seanny boy,” came a voice from the passenger side. It was Tim’s.
“Geez Louise! What the fuck is going on, guys? Where the hell are your taking me?” he asked.
“All in good time,” Tim said.
“Feel like I’ve been kidnapped by Shia militiamen, for God’s sake,” Sean said.
Tim and the driver looked at each other and smiled.
“I told you,” the driver said to Tim.
“Had to be this way,” Tim said. “Sorry Sean.”
“Yeah, and I was just having the first good time I have had in like, three years back there!” Sean said slamming his fist on the roof of the van.
They drove the streets of Palm Bay for an hour until they were absolutely sure they weren’t being followed.
Sean was introduced to the driver, a black guy named Gus Torrence, who, it turned out, was also a structural engineer for Camerdyne who had known Sean’s brother, Ryan.
They pulled into the garage of an innocuous house in Southwest Palm Bay.
“The home is owned by an alias named Mark Stebbins,” Tim said. “He runs Germann Cleaning Services, out of this house with his unhappy wife.”
“Who’s the wife?”
“Oh, don’t you know? You’re sleeping with her at this very moment. Mark is totally unaware, of course. Her name is Lorna. How is she, by the way?”
“Never laid a hand on her,” Sean said.
“Yeah, that’s some bullshit, right there,” Tim said.
“Okay, she’s one hell of a kisser,” Sean said.
“Uh-huh, I thought so. You’ve got to learn to lie better,” Tim said.
They got out of the van.
“When they run NORA software on Lorna’s face, they’ll hit this address which is okay, we expect that, but after this meeting, we’ll have to relocate the safe house.”
“NORA? Isn’t that…”
“Intelligence software used to recognize faces, absolutely right. But that’s good, see? You’re having an affair with a gorgeous married woman, senator, not working in league with some underground shadow organization that may or may not be dangerous to the US Government,” Tim said.
“Man, Tim. You’ve really changed,” Sean said after a brief, surprised lapse in the ability to speak.
“You’ve got to misdirect the enemy, Sean. Then you’ve got to do it again, and again, when you’re fighting the sort of war we are faced with,” Tim said.
“Oh yeah? What sort of war is that?”
“Guerilla war, pure, and simple. Before long it will be a bare-knuckles brawl. Now you’ve been on the other side of just such a war for years. What do you think that does for our cause?” Tim said.
“Gives you the other perspective,” Sean said.
“Precisely,” Tim said.
“Tim I certainly appreciate you doing all this for me, but can we get down to…?”
“Right this way. Everyone’s waiting for you,” Tim said.
They entered the living room and Sean was amazed to see Smokey, Gary, Tom, Chuck, and Dave, along with about seven other people Sean had never seen before.
“Oh my Lord! What the hell are y’all doing here?”
“Hey we didn’t like riding in the damn van either, my friend,” Tom said.
After a few back slaps and hugs Tim began.
“The man who was your bellhop is Antonio Souza. He’s a graduate of Gary’s high school program for at-risk kids with a degree in business administration and with experience as a network administrator. He works at the hotel in his spare hours getting ready to put himself through a master’s program,” Tim said.
The young man stood up and smiled.
“Gus still works for Camerdyne as does his colleague Dr. Jennifer Epstein who is sitting by the fireplace,” Tim said.
The pretty, slim woman in her thirties raised her hand and smiled. She had jet black hair and sharp features.
“We have the former Florida director of MUFON, sitting to her right, Dr. Clyde Wellington,” Tim said.
“MUFON?”
“Mutual UFO Network, correct,” Tim said.
The academic looking gentleman in his fifties stood and took Sean’s hand.
“The honor is all mine, mate,” Wellington said in a pleasant Kiwi accent. “This is my wife, Meghan.”
Sean shook the woman’s hand. She rendered a sweet smile for him and said “so pleased to meet you, finally. We’ve heard so much about you.”
Sean began to feel dizzy. What the hell had his brother gotten him into?
“Sean, we’ve got this Lazy Boy ready for you. Would you like a beer, a glass of wine, or something stronger? The show lasts about an hour and you’re in for a few shocks,” Tim continued.
“Beer is fine,” Sean said.
“Tony, bring the man a shot with that beer. If he won’t have it, I will,” Tim said.
“When all of this came about, Sean, I lied to myself and said that I would make all the preparations necessary to hand all the details of the operation over to you and return to my family,” Tim said.
“But, that was not to be. Sheila left me, and I don’t blame her for that. What sane woman wouldn’t? That also fits in with their plans to weaken us, I guess. And that’s fine.”
“As you know, I started a few companies with some of the money and a few tools your brother had given me. The IRS is still sorting through the red tape and documents trying to discover how, out of no-where, in three years I was able to amass more than a half billion dollars industry,” he said.
“Highjump Products, produces high quality survival gear for a reason. We have opened up shop in seventeen countries, including Cuba, Mexico, Honduras, Ireland, Costa Rica, Spain, Canada, and Great Britain.
“We have about thirty-thousand employees worldwide, in those countries, of which one hundred managers have a fair idea what my plans are for the next five years,” Tim said.
“You want me to come work for you? This is a sales pitch?”
“God, don’t I wish. No, Sean. We want to put you in the senate, then the Whitehouse; to turn the tide on an alien invasion that has been going on since before the 1940s.
“Why me?”
“Because your brother wrote this document, which we all signed, just before he was murdered,” Tim said handing Sean a copy of Ryan’s Human Declaration of Independence.
“Now some of the language in this document is rather harsh when it comes to the U.S. Government. But if you remember back to when Ryan died, he knew what was coming in the near future, and while the exact dates of some of his predictions have since proved inaccurate, basically everything he told us has come to pass,” Tim said.
“If they’re so accurate, why don’t the dates match?” Sean said.
“Quantum physics. It has something to do with changing an outcome by knowing it, or seeking to know it,” Tim said. “It means there’s some interference in the works but, basically things work out in the direction which history is progressing.
“The fact the dates don’t match the predictions exactly says that just by us meeting and sharing with each other what we know about our common enemy we may have been partially successful in the future, but, that means there is a lot of work to do, to free mankind entirely from a parasite that has been at our throats for years and that’s where this presentation comes in, to tell you what we know, all of it. Hang on to your hat brother,” Tim said.
“Why?”
“You are about to experience a sort of decompression sickness,” said Gus from the back of the room.
The lights went out, and Sean was handed his beer and his shot, which by now he couldn’t resist.
The image came on a wall in front of the recliner. It was obviously a theater-styled classroom of some sort.
Gus continued; “Dealing with the day to day life of knowing your society is being invaded by hostile alien elements produces a sickness akin to battle fatigue. It also produces a kind of psychosis if you will.”
“If you look up on the screen you will see a presentation given by Doctor Epstein at Camerdyne Systems Space Labs in San Diego California during the summer of 2013. This is the day I first met her, at your brother’s urging. Just as Tim was urged to meet her, and just as we are urging, for you to listen to her and learn from this amazing woman, by watching this presentation.
“I recorded the event using a tiny camera I secreted inside my Jacksonville Jaguars sidelines cap. I doubt if anyone suspected I would record the presentation, I’d still be living today,” he said.
“Why did you record it?”
“Because I knew what she was about to tell the group of us aerospace engineers, would be earth shattering, and I wanted a record of it. I guess, I also got sick and tired of being followed, of being asked to make out two itinerary’s for myself so that someone, somewhere, would be thwarted ever so slightly in their efforts to constantly monitor my every action. I guess it was just part of my stubborn pride that said, I will not be controlled. Instead, this time, I will do the controlling,” Gus continued in that deep baritone everyone was soon hypnotized by.
“So about this decompression sickness. What you’re about to see is the room full of us, all engineers, all schooled, mature supposedly, being turned into babies by the information in front of us; information that lets all of us know, we are being indoctrinated into a university of sorts, for the reverse engineering of alien technology.
“Once this dawns on you, as a member of the freshman class, your life turns upside down. You can see glances shoot around the room alerting every sentient human in the room, that they have become part of a conspiracy to overrun the world by a species comfortable or lazy enough, to allow us to do some of the work for them. Just take a look…” Gus said as the lights dimmed.