Chapter 7 Dipshits and Wizards

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

(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

(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

(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

(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.