(Copyright David Anthony Kearns. All rights reserved. Not for commercial republication in any form.)
Dec. 13, 2014 Newnan, Georgia - Awbrey Strothers crossed his legs on the coffee table watching the dregs of a CNN report. He hissed like a snake on the inhale, and then let the pot smoke pop out of his mouth in pleasant little O rings that followed each other toward the breeze coming from the screen door.
This is fuckin’ juvenile, he thought. I can’t believe I’m doing this.
The weed was his cousin Donny’s, left in a little baggie on the table. This was Donny’s house, in fact, in Newnan, Georgia. The dwelling was a long, singlewide that was stilted on the down-slope of a modest declivity surrounded by skinny pines and brown, soggy needles, way out in the middle of Bum Fuck Egypt.
Donny was a lawn guy, and he wasn’t here just now. Good thing. Donny, also, didn’t lock up, never did anymore. It was the sort of lapse that was so very Donny in nature: Donny-logic. See if he locked up, he’d have to remember his keys when he returned from his Donny-doings, and he might not remember, to remember the keys, on said doings, and he would get pissed and bust things.
Donny routinely started his yellow Ford F-150 with a screwdriver he had jammed into the ignition when the convolution of the keys – losing, finding, making new ones over at Wal-Mart and the losing those - had reverberated so much, one day in a rage he just ripped the bolt tumbler out and sort of jury rigged it. It was also, so very Donny of him.
Hard to believe Donny was not only kin to Awbrey, but represented the state-of- the-art in the human species. Hell, Donny was thriving! Had him a business; had him a nice girlfriend who didn’t mind him having to spend so much on child support; had him a hot-tub on the back porch. Even had him a little Shetland sheep collie in that little doghouse beneath the rabbit hutch that never once tried to run away on him, likely out of pure terror.
And then ladies and gentlemen, we have X, thought Awbrey.
X was out sitting on the hood of Awbrey’s mindnight blue Chevelle Malibu, circa 1971, mint condition. Yes, with the white racing stripes and the Bridgestone with raised white letters.
And why did X insist on doing that? Well, owing to the peculiarities of all that is X, he was presently sniffing the air; said he could pick up ‘man-sign’ that way like a bloodhound.
“X, get off the damned car and get in here. You’ll scare folks who drive by!” Awbrey hollered through the screen door.
“Ain’t nobody coming,” X said in his nasal, high-pitched whine. Liked to make dogs seek cover the way he sort of yowled everything, thought Awbrey. Sounded like a little girl crying in homeroom when she discovers her menstruation.
It was amazing how fast X had picked up southern vernacular in the space of a few days. Had all the inflections, and the drawl just right.
“Cash Cab reruns on?” X whined.
“No, Cash Cab ain’t on, X,” Awbrey said.
“Damn, I like that show,” X said.
Satisfied for the moment that man-sign content of the air particles was minimal, apart from that coming from Awbrey, X rolled off the hood, wandered in and wiped his bare feet on the welcome mat, then padded instinctively into the kitchen. It was sad the way his jeans hung down in bunches near those spastically articulated toes of his but he just wasn’t built like your standard man. Top half of him was sort of regular, but the legs were bent, and sized at about half scale.
“This place got any beer,” he asked, checking the fridge. “Yes! Touchdown!”
“Hell, son, they about turned you into an alckie down there didn’t they,” Awbrey said.
“So what if they did,” X said, and that was precisely the same sort of thing Donny would say, in that same defeated, downbeat tone, although an octave lower.
See, that was another weird thing about X; he somehow picked up on the psychic vibrations of a place, right from the get go, like he could feel the presence of anyone who had ever been there. Mostly it was just Donny in this room, so X had just channeled him without even knowing.
X - you had to hand it to him. The guy was a hoot to have around. Funnier ‘n hell, if you took away the circumstances, thought Awbrey.
“Didn’t we just shave your feet this morning,” Awbrey said trying not to offend. X was also very sensitive.
X sat on the couch, and slurped his Budweiser ignoring the jibe for now.
“CNN’s for shit anymore. It’s six o’clock, why not turn on CNBC?” X said.
“It’s not like you got any investments, man, do you?” Awbrey said.
X ignored that jibe too. “Gimme a hit of that. You’re obviously a mean-assed stoner who’s had way too much.”
“They give you pot in there, too?” Awbrey asked.
“There’s a lot you don’t know, about me. A lot,” X said taking the roach and toking it like a pro. Unfortunately this ruse had its limitations. X possessed virgin lungs. He exploded in a coughing jag ending in a teary-eyed gasp.
“Yep, that’s just how they do it in the movies, X. You did everything right, right up to the point where you couldn’t hold it in.”
X smiled. For some reason that was funny.
“No Y-fi in here either I suppose,” X said, and now in pot-speak, he sounded like a kid on helium.
“Donny ain’t exactly a high tech sort of guy, X. Sorry. No Y-Fi, no Tivo, no Smartlife” Awbrey said with a big grin which broke into a chuckle followed by a cough.
“What’s funny?”
“Donny and Smartlife; the thought thereof. Do the math.”
“Ain’t a genius, is he,” X said.
“Who do you have to G-mail anyway?”
“Nunyo..”
“Nunyo Damn Bidness?”
“Precisely the fellow,” X said toking again.
“Careful X. It’s creeper. It Creeps up on you like man-sign.”
X watched a lot of movies. Since his cloning, this was practically the only activity he had been permitted, apart from reading and indoor soccer in the company gymnasium.
They cordoned off the gym, only top brass of the contractor Camerdyne Systems Inc., and Air Force personnel who had been cleared, would get to watch the games. X took them on three and four at a time, and always won. What a reality show you could make, thought Awbrey: indoor soccer with a cave man.
They wouldn’t let him build a skateboard ramp. He had no use for basketball, hated it. He was built too low to the ground for that. But give him an indoor soccer ball and a couple of goals and he ruled that thing.
X got a lot of what he said piped in to him from a local cable television station.
Georgia cable was different from Florida cable, but he knew the basics of all American dialects and even a little Spanish by now. He said television had a suicidal effect on him but, the meds helped him sort it all out and keep his perspective; his X-y bead on things, as it were.
He also wanted this agreed upon right up front, that he looked nothing like the guys in the old Geico commercials, when in fact, he did, only a little shorter, and with a longer nose, and a barrel chest, and these ears that kind of, peeked out at you from the sides of his head. There was also the smell, Le ode du Ex, to consider, which Awbrey never mentioned.
Even the name X came from popular culture, during just another boring-ass day answering questions, taking tests and watching movies, when he had done with the tests in about half the time it took for the smartest homo sapiens to complete them.
X.
And when they had given him all of it, everything they knew about him and where he came from, the whole story start to finish he listened quietly, politely and said “Okay, I’ll call myself X. “
And they said; “that’s crazy. Why?”
And he said; “I was inspired in the way Malcolm X chose his last name to represent the unknown variable, the slave name that no longer exists”
And then they said, “You can’t do that.”
And he said; “The fuck I can’t! My name is Xavier. X for short.”
And they couldn’t argue so they said “ok.”
And they found out his mind was like a ravenous beast. He devoured the internet and all its many applications from porn to tweet, in a number of days as though no more difficult to swallow than a sloppy pile of whipped potatoes. Thank you can I have more?
X got bored fooling with that until he discovered online trading. He made calls for some of the guys at the Camerdyne plant, then bam, the hero was given indulgencies, like Budweiser. Then he discovered sports betting, and bam again - he damned near had groupies on staff working for him. They were practically naming buildings after him.
You need anything X? Anything we can get you?
At one point a hooker had even been bribed with a whole shit-load of money, and given a blindfold. It was whispered that X wasn’t too keen on bestiality at first, but he sampled the merchandise all the same. Nothing else to do; the reverse on the whole Planet of the Apes deal. And yes, Awbrey and X even talked about that movie during one of their many recent sessions.
“Chuck Heston must have been gay, dude. I saw that movie! He should have gone after that female?”
“You mean Mrs. Cornelius?” Awbrey had winced.
“She was fine!” X said with a laugh. “But the rubber teeth would have gotten in the way!”
X what a goof.
Again, this all would be humorous were it not for the reason he had been cloned in the first place, and why it was kept so secret.
“So Unc!” X said suddenly.
And yeah, they had bonded so well, he thought of Awbrey as his uncle, a crazy uncle, at that.
“What X?”
“Explain me this Christianity business again, as you see it.”
“Dude, I am way too tired and too stoned now for that conversation. We have to make a plan. We ain’t got time…”
“But you always mention it in your books!”
“Which ones have you actually read, and I mean, all the way through, X?”
“Well, I thought the character of Priscilla in White Lion of Stone Mountain was somewhat two-dimensional,” he quipped.
“Nice try, ace. The books, not Kirkus review off the web,” Awbrey said.
“Alright, I haven’t read any of them,” X said.
“You read just about everything else in there, why not me?”
“They wouldn’t let me. They knew you and I would meet,” he said.
“No shit,” Awbrey said to this. This fact, if true, was amazing; it was a window on the convoluted rationalizations, the tweaked and perverted reasoning of the contractor/government cabal.
“They really said you can’t read my books just because we were going to meet?”
“Honest engine. Thought it would screw something up,” he said.
“Well, we screwed up anyway, didn’t we?”
“Sure did,” X said as the commercial came on.
“And that stuff really happened?” X asked.
“What?”
“You know, the Civil War and all that,” X asked.
X did this every now and again. He needed confirmation to decipher was actual history, and what was bullshit handed him by geneticists and anthropologists at the company. He knew that somewhere along the line, a great big chunk of it would wildly diverge, he just hadn’t found out what part of history was bullshit yet. Maybe all of it was.
“Hell yeah, it happened,” Awbrey said turning to look into the boy’s eyes. He wanted him to know it was true, real truth, true-true, no bullshit and he didn’t want to be tormented with a bunch of “really?’s”.
X just shook his head; “and they knew that blacks were human beings and they wanted to keep slavery going?”
“Fuckin’ A they did,” Awbrey said.
“It just don’t make sense, Unc.”
“Tell me about it. We are a fucked up species, my friend.”
“I’ll say…”
“Look,” Awbrey said tossing the Nerf football into a laundry basket by the television. “We can’t stay here too long, X. Donny’ll be home and he ain’t put together too well, mentally. He’ll have some kind of conniption fit if he lays eyes on you. This was quick little place to recharge but we need to beat feet.”
“Man-sign?”
“Yeah, man-sign, big-time! I’m surprised we haven’t seen anything on CNN,” Awbrey said.
“Unc, think about it, what would they say? What would they tell reporters? I mean, look at me!”
“You got a point, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t out there looking,” Awbrey said.
After they had taken their respective leaks and checked for shedding on the floor, they shuffled out to the Malibu.
“Wear the hat!” Awbrey said as they jumped in.
“I hate the hat,” X said to this, but put it on just the same, a nice red and white Braves rally cap.
Nothing wrong here officer, just an extremely ugly hobo down on his luck being given a lift; a gnome with a Braves cap on. Nothing out of the ordinary and sundry.
“I can hear, Unc. It hurts sometimes what you think.”
“Sorry, man,” said Awbrey.
*
“You realize of course, we have to get rid of this car, Unc.” He said this somewhere south of the Georgia - North Carolina line.
“Awe, man we can’t get rid of The Bird! What would make you say such a heinous thing?” Awbrey said.
“Sat coverage on the east coast is good, down to the half hour, something flies over, takes a picture, every twenty-nine minutes at least. That’s a conservative guess,” X said. He was a wealth of information.
“How did you know how to disable the tracking device?” Awbrey asked.
X was almost asleep when he answered; “It was in your Smartlife System. GPS tracks you. You don’t realize how many little unanswered emails are being sent and received with that thing. One to your home, one to them, all through your ISP, one from your home to them when you start to move. The whole thing had to go, man. Simple. I ripped the whole thing out. But, they got sats and they have a vector,” he said.
“A vector?”
“We’d be trapped on a peninsula called Florida. Had to head north. Makes sense. You weren’t going to try to get me a fake passport were you, leave on a cruise ship out of Miami or Canaveral? I get a big picture of that happening, and so do they. Had to be north. Then it’s just a question of routes. I-95, I-75 corridors. I’m actually surprised we made it this far in this damned thing. Racing stripes, who does that anymore?”
“Hey turd brain, this is a classic automobile,” Awbrey said.
“Classic red-neck mobile, you mean,” X said to this.
“Fuckin-A right, buddy!”
“Think Unc. If we’re going to make it all the way to D.C. we have to have a less conspicuous ride and you know it,” X said.
And he was right. Awbrey just hadn’t figured out a way to swap out yet that made any sense.
“So, explain to me how they approached you again,” X said.
“Two years ago, nearly to the day, I’m on my lonesome in my big ole house in Dalonega. And Carol…”
“That’s your wife,” X said.
“Ex-wife, yeah. Carol has gone. I’m suffering a wicked case of writer’s block..”
“This was after Purple Mountain was published?”
“Right, but I hadn’t written a damn thing in nearly a year. My agent calls me out of the blue and said a government contractor wants to offer me a million dollars to work for them, for a year,” he said.
“This was Camerdyne,” X said.
“No, they used a cut-out at first, and by now you know, Camerdyne is a cut-out for NSA or DARPA or someone like that, working through the Air Force,” Awbrey said.
“Cut outs, for cut-outs, for road-signs for bill-boards…” X said.
“Guy behind the guy, kinda shit. A Chinese puzzle with no end,” Awbrey said.
“Alright, why you?” X asked.
“I got my degree in history and anthropology from GSU. I’m an award-winning southern writer, and a Pulitzer candidate,” Awbrey said.
“Yeah but why you?”
“They said it had something to do with my theories on military strategy. Then they said it had to do with my theories on quantum phenomena and the occult, in which, my background is pretty extensive,” Awbrey said.
“But you don’t believe that,” X said.
“I’m wondering now, if maybe project BACKROADS was just looking for another Oswald,” Awbrey answered.
“You aren’t looking to kill the president, are you?”
“No but I am driving around with a cave man in my car,” Awbrey said.
“Cave boy, you mean. I’m thirteen. And Unc, as you know, cave men, as they are called in the parlance, are actually homo sapiens, although I’m not so sure about the sapiens end of the Latin. I think Linneaus got that part wrong. I am a proud member of the homo neanderthal branch of the human family tree,” he said.
“Right..”
“And what would they need a patsy for anyway?”
“I haven’t figured that out yet but it did seem awful easy to get your sorry ass out of that facility,” Awbrey said.
“ I think that is just your rabid paranoia at work again heightened by the recent use of a control substance. You need to take your medicine. It was like you said. You wanted to show me a real soccer field. They trusted you,” X said.
“So, did they tell you how they did it?” Awbrey asked.
“The cloning? Yeah, most of it. They were able to isolate DNA from a sample somewhere, somehow. They evacuated the nucleus of a gorilla embryo, injected my DNA. I was gestated inside a gorilla mother, and I came to term. Dolly the sheep primate style,” he said.
“What I can’t figure out is where they got Neander DNA,” X said.
“I know,” Awbrey said. “Your DNA was found inside vacuum frozen glass tubes in a sealed titanium vault, inside a cave. And that cave was found beneath a half a mile of ice in Antarctica,” Awbrey said.
“Well, that certainly would rewrite some history books,” X said.
“Science books, religious texts, all of it. You name it,” Awbrey added.
“What is BACKROADS?” X said.
“Top Secret government project to come up with a scenario for a hostile takeover of all we hold dear, free market capitalism, society etc. etc. etc.”
“So..?”
“They asked me to brainstorm it using everything I knew and I came to the conclusion that a web attack with viruses would be a starting point and I illustrated how,” Awbrey said.
“And..?”
“They said ‘think bigger we got that covered’ So back I marched out there into the world of research and I said, likely the Chinese or other communist block countries would side with a destructive element of the Jihadi movements, meanwhile a socialist block would be created consisting of Cuba, Venezuela and other Latin nations. Street gangs and the Jihadis would find common interest in our demise as a society. Look for demonstrations so forth escalating in the US and US-backed Latin nations and their connections with the Chinese.
“Then it occurred to me that all this economic activity with China was just a ruse. That they opened their capital markets to us with the deliberate intention of attempting to crash the stock markets and all world markets at a later date, when all of this unrest was taking place,” Awbrey said.
“Does it hurt being you? What did they say?”
“They said ‘hell we know all about that already, think bigger!’”
“And then?”
“Then things got weird,” Awbrey said.
“Then we met,” X said with a laugh.
“No, not yet. First they showed me a film about Hernando Cortez and I had already done some research on him, how he conquered Mexico. Then they brought an Air Force guy in to speak with me. I wasn’t supposed to look into his eyes or address him by name. I think he was Air Force anyway. He went by the name of Glen.”
“Glen?”
“Just Glen”
“What was his deal?”
“Somehow they had a discarded pill bottle from my trash and I hadn’t admitted during my polygraphs that I took anti-depressants. He said it was a federal crime and I was to be given new polygraphs later. But then he said to me ‘Mr. Strothers, what would happen to you if you stopped taking this for a week?’ and I said; ‘Hell I’d probably nut out’”
“What did he say?”
“Aw, he just nodded, then in marched another guy with a brief case full of different meds, pain pills, dick-straighteners, downers for the spastic, sero-pops for the schitzos, all kinds of shit that was prescription. And then he says, ‘Mr. Strothers what would happen to society, if all the sudden, all this crap wasn’t available on the open market?’ and I said ‘Hell, we’d all probably nut out’”
“What did Glen say to this?”
“He said ‘Mr Strothers, do you see where we are going with this?’ and I said, ‘No, not exactly’ and he said, ‘we hired you to bring yourself up to speed and you’ve done that. But we didn’t hire you for your prowess as a computer wiz or as a military strategist. We have people who can do that. We hired you for your ability to think laterally and in four dimensions, as exemplified in your background, and your ability at structure in novel writing.’”
“Nice compliment,” X said. “Then what?”
“He says, ‘I give you a week to think on it, on top of which, ask yourself what would happen if all the world, were suddenly controlled by one central authority?’”
“Then what?”
“I come back in and I am utterly clueless so, they gave me a clue,” Awbrey said.
“In walks an archeologist, nice looking dame, but all business. She takes out some artifacts, bones carved with handles used for fire making, spear heads, a piece of wood obviously used for sowing seeds,” Awbrey said.
“So?”
“Well the funny thing about them is, they were are per-mineralized, you know? Petrified. They had been in the earth more than half a million years and they had turned to stone. Wasn’t supposed to be. She says, ‘these were uncovered in the desert in New Mexico,’” Awbrey said with an exhale. X could tell this part made him nervous.
“And?”
“Homeboy, sapiens didn’t fully genetically evolve until 60,000 years ago, the Human Genome project pretty much proved it. So, it’s likely these were tools your folks had made, X, and there was more. It turns out there was much more,” Awbrey said.
“Huh,” X said casually.
“Same Air Force guy comes back in and says, ‘here I want you to read this,’ hands me a Bible. ‘Focus on the book of revelations and tell me why you think it’s in there,’” then he walks out.
“Well that shit about blew my mind when I started thinking about it.”
“What conclusion did you come to?”
“That all this shit has happened before. By the way, you’re living proof,” Awbrey said as the turned off a dirt road in rural North Carolina.
#
They purchased a nearly ancient 1977 Chevy Nova from a used-car dealership outside of Cherokee North Carolina.
The bird was left as part of the trade. Awbrey asked the guy to either paint The Bird, or shelter it for a few days. The guy wouldn’t scrape off the VIN number, said it was illegal but he did agree to keep it covered in a shed on the property before he sold it.
“What’s the matter son? Are you with The Brand?” the dealer had asked Awbrey after listening to his strange, furtive requests.
Awbrey said no, we was not a member of the Aryan Brotherhood, but some people from the government were looking for he and his little pal, who had a medical condition.
“I’ll say,” said the car dealer, taking one look at the boy. “Is it contagious?”
“Oh, uh. No, sir. It’s that he grows hair waaaaay too fast. They got a whole team of experts who want to look at him, for some military thing, and he’s had just about enough of their bullshit.”
“Military thing?”
“Yeah you know, fighting in cold climes? Or when you’re in survival mode out in the wilderness. Some sort of enzyme to make the hair grow. His body produces it like crazy,” Awbrey said.
“Who is he to you?”
“He’s my nephew,” Awbrey said before he knew what was out of his mouth. X just smiled really big.
“Well, son, my condolences,” the dealer said at last, seeming to believe them.
“Should have told him you were with The Brand,” X whispered “He’d a done it, fore, shore! And he didn’t believe your bullshit story by the way, though, nice try.”
“Shhhhhh,” Awbrey said.
“And did you have to buy a 1970s muscle car? This here sled’s only one county over from Hazard,” X asked as they pulled away again.
“Hazard?”
“Yeah, unc, as in Dukes of…?”
“Way too many reruns for a growing boy,” Awbrey hissed in disgust.
“I’m just saying it’s not very random of you.”
“Well, we need something I can work on if it breaks down.”
“If?”
“You’re not helping,” Awbrey said, adding “smartass.”
“Least I got to see the wider world,” X said dejectedly.
“I don’t understand modern cars. That’s why the dealerships charge so much to do anything. You can’t get your hands in there and fix things. Always have to have a lift and special tools,” Awbrey said.
“Planned obsolescence,” X said.
“So, why quantum physics?” X asked randomly.
“Timelines. You think of a building, right?”
“Uh-huh,” X said.
“Each little floor is a chunk of history,” Awbrey said.
“Yeah?”
“Modern human beings exist on, let’s say, the 23rd floor.”
“Okay, I’m with you,” X said.
“Neanders exist on Floor 22,” Awbrey said.
“Speed up. I’m still with you,” X said.
“Now, the building can be thought of as a company edifice that produces something.”
“What?”
“Widgets, atom bombs. Don’t get too far ahead of yourself, sport. It doesn’t matter for right now,” Awbrey said. “The point is, the floors, the walls, the bathrooms, are all laid out sort of like a maze, just like in a building.
“Mankind, and I mean baby mankind, and baby Neander-man, get off their respective elevators and are cordoned, corralled into certain rooms. And the rooms are laid out identically on each floor, but the ceilings and the floors separate these two counterparts as they negotiate their various mazes and find the tools they need to get into the next rooms, to do whatever it is they’re supposed to do before moving on with those tools in hand,” Awbrey said.
“And this is the explanation you gave the Air Force guy? I wish I had seen his face,” X said. “You don’t need a PhD to come up with this.”
“Yeah, he was pissed. But, he knew I was right,” Awbrey said. “It’s so simple, it’s been right under our noses the whole time.”
“So the walls are what?”
“Major events that run through the structure of the building, that send you and I down our own respective hallways into different rooms. Biblical shit, floods, eruptions, comet and asteroid impacts, diseases, stuff like that. Any periodic, natural, calamitous event that makes resources scarce and forces our respective developments a certain way, no matter what,” Awbrey said. “Walls in the office building that have no way to be circumvented, leading to walls of our own construction.”
“Wars,” X said.
“Now you’re getting it, X. Good boy.”
“Wait a sec? Who owns the office building?”
“Good question, but you’re getting ahead of yourself. Now, what I came up with for the Air Force, and this was about the time we met, I postulated that there is a certain point in the development of the monkey, where he gets too smart for himself. He gains the peak of his technical knowledge and expertise, which, forces him down corridors on the back side of the building. These events on the backside are what drive him back towards the elevator shaft; they are events that reduce him back down toward the spine of the family tree. The eighties rock group Devo had it right. They called the top and said everything forward of that time was de-evolution.”
“So that a little bit of him,” X interjected, “is used to form the monkey that emerges on the next floor.”
“Right. Now, the caretaker, the building manager that you asked about. He sees that the only window to the next floor for the monkey, is that event that forms the basis of the genetic timeline and elevator shaft. That tiny population of monkeys that survives, say, a polar-magnetic shift, and all its after effects.
“Caretaker, now, he’s a sneaky bastard and a quantum being. He can see time laid out like a building. And when you think about it in a four-d model, it is. All events are actually occurring simultaneously in his world view. Quantum theory teaches you that.
“He can ride the elevator, up and down. In fact, he doesn’t need an elevator. He has backstairs, keys to locked doors and hatches between floors; he has window-washing gear and he can get into any floor, any room, at any time he wants.”
“Kind of like a janitor landlord,” X laughed.
“Worse, his job is to drop in every now and then and direct the monkey as needed,” Awbrey said. “See this wall here, you’re about to run into it, turn do this…blab bla-bla.”
“Religion,” said X.
“If you think about it, every major religion has an apocalypse spelled out. Prophets Edgar Cayce and Nostradamus had very similar views on this as well. Notice that the religions themselves, are calling each other the great Satan right now. And there’s even a little guidebook in every one that details what the great Satan will look like.”
“Which is what?”
“A warlike human being who has a great public speaking voice. In short every intelligent human on the face of the earth. Isn’t that just great? Ain’t that convenient? Look in the mirror for examples. And yet the average human is, and has been, worked up into a lather trying to find this Anti-Christ in a finger-pointing, racist, ethnocentric rage.”
“On to the back side of the building, I suppose,” X said.
“And Caretaker is perfectly okay with that going on. So what does that tell you about him?” Awbrey said.
“He doesn’t give a shit?” X asked.
“He never did. In fact, all of our bullshit suits his purposes, just fine,” Awbrey said.
“You’re saying God, doesn’t care,” X said and he seemed happy with this theory.
“No, not God. Caretaker. There’s a big difference. Caretaker is just another creature. More advanced. We are sort of a hive, a farm, or a colony of creatures he uses.”
“He put us here, on the farm.”
“Likely not, in my view. But he conquered time-space, created his back passages, and he uses our goofy plundering through our respective floors to his advantage. To him, all our bullshit combined with natural events forms sort of a clock where he can keep his own timeline straight, so he doesn’t paradox himself, his own coworkers tweaking and manipulating humans on other floors.”
“Damn,” X said.
“Yeah, damn. You’re damn right, damn. But, and here’s the deal, right about the time the monkey gets too smart for himself, he actually becomes too smart for the caretaker’s purposes. He actually takes his first peek through one of the windows looking outside and he realizes where he is.”
“How so?”
“In his struggle for security he builds the atom bomb. In so doing he begins to see some of the laws of mathematics, physics, chemistry that bind up the universe. At that moment he understands that religion is far too arcane a construct to even begin to describe God. He begins to see the walls, doors, floors, everything and he realizes they can be circumvented.”
“And the Caretaker?”
“Well don’t you know old Caretaker he’s seen this kind of behavior before, in homo habilis, homo ergaster, homo heidelbergensis, homo neanderthalensis, because time really is laid out like a building where everything has happened, will happen, and is happening all at once. So, Caretaker knows just when to show up and stir the pot, keep the monkey’s interests moving in the right direction,” Awbrey said.
X leaned back in his seat and looked over at Awbrey. Was he being serious?
“Roswell, 1947,” said X.
“Good. You see where I’m going,” Awbrey said.
“What did the Air Force say when you came up with this one?” X asked.
“It was like they expected me to go in this direction. After I told them about the building construct, they knew where I was going, because by now they saw it too,” Awbrey said. “It was like a piece in a giant puzzle fell neatly into place.”
“But wait a second, are you saying that Neanderthals, my kind, developed to the stage of the atom bomb?”
“It’s highly possible and more than likely. Neanderthals roamed the planet for more than four hundred thousand years. As humans go, we’ve been here for only sixty thousand and look at us,” Awbrey said.
“But..”
“But nothing. Science is now proving that your kind had the capacity for language. That you can speak is evident in the fact we’re having this conversation. Your brain size on average was larger, not smaller than homo sapiens. Look at some of things you can do, X; you possess psychic abilities, you can smell a man who is hunting you from more than a mile!”
“But I thought we were wiped out in Europe, hunted down!”
“You were, by my kind. Remember the back side of the building. This was long after your societies had been destroyed in my opinion. The new and improved model finished you off.”
“Improved?”
“From Caretaker’s viewpoint, slightly less intelligent, way more aggressive, and we run faster than y’all.”
“So you’re saying…”
“All the shit we’re going through, your kind went through, before. You likely had the internet, television or their equivalents, Monday night football, World Cup Soccer, women’s rights, Vietnam, China, racial tensions, all of it. This has all been done before,” Awbrey said.
“But there would be evidence?”
“Picture a massive calamity. A polar reversal, or the like. Then throw a hundred thousand years on top of it for all, or most, of that evidence to be systematically erased by Caretaker.”
“Most?”
“You’re forgetting the titanium, lead-lined case found in Antarctica with your DNA inside it. At least two hundred thousand years old. Frozen, sealed so that no one would find it, so that a quarter million years of gamma rays would not destroy the structure of your DNA. That’s thought, that’s planning. That’s intelligence. That’s desperation,” Awbrey said.
“And what I can’t figure out is how they knew, how they did it, unless they too understood finally what was happening to them. They had no other option. They could see the building and they wanted to build their own little window to the next floor,” Awbrey said.
“How come Caretaker missed it?” X said.
“Because Caretaker is flawed, like us. He ain’t perfect. And if he has imperfections, he can be defeated and we can truly live free.”
“How would he be defeated?”
“One, the near impossible would have to happen. We agree to stop fighting each other as a species. That paradoxes the next floor. If you paradox him, this majorly screws up his itinerary and can physically destroy him in the floor above this one. See? You construct a new floor up there a floor where he is not the master, but we are.”
“Sure, some of the walls are going to be there. Big events which we can begin to predict the better we understand geology and astronomy, but other stuff, wars, and that, we can control!”
“You mentioned that the building produces something,” X said. “What is that?”
“Now we get to the heart of who Caretaker is, what he does,” Awbrey said. “The monkey…”
“That’s us, collective humanity,” X said.
“Right, the monkey builds stuff with his little-bitty mind and his opposable thumbs. He’s good like that. But, from Caretaker’s view, you don’t want him to get too smart. Now evolution is at work while his knowledge base grows. During those peak hours, just before he outsmarts not only himself, but you the Caretaker, he’s capable of a lot of things. You give him some technology you have at your disposal, like the semi-conductor. He fools with it, and then you give him something else, say, stealth-tech, or even anti-gravity drives. What does he do with it?”
“I don’t know?”
“What is his first inclination and by that I mean my species’ first inclination; it might not have been yours, remembering that mankind was bred for aggression to a certain extent?” Awbrey said.
“Weapons?”
“Weaponology. It is his first instinct because monkey is a paranoid motherfucker, above all other quirks and vices. He’s a natural born chicken-shit and he’s worried that the other guy across the fence, or the Berlin Wall, or the Great Wall of China might have figured this wonderful thing out on his own, see?”
“So?”
“Well, like William Penn and his beads for Pennsylvania, or whatever, or Cortez offering guns and steel, or Americans offering the Winchester rifle, Caretaker gives him baby steps so monkey man can think he’s ahead of the other guy. Meantime, Caretaker’s got monkey man’s busy little opposables working on other stuff as a trade off,” Awbrey said.
“Space ships.”
“Right. Stuff so secret not even God knows about it. He’s got him sending up huge secret satellite arrays pointing to the center of the galaxy to chat with who-the-fuck-knows. See?
“Caretaker likes his galaxial hot rods, likes zipping back and forth through wormholes and whatnot. But, he’s flawed. It’s likely he can’t breed anymore. It’s likely he needs timelines to keep everything straight in his own mind because when he zips off at light speed, then finds his way back through a worm hole, time has gone all caddywampus on him. He not only has to say ‘where am I,’ but he ask to ask himself ‘when am I?’ and that’s a very important question.”
“Why? How?”
“Don’t you see? He’s outsmarted himself. Little paradoxes and gamma bursts have screwed up his DNA so bad he can’t make babies. He also needs a time-clock so he doesn’t make the problems even worse and that’s where we come in. Our silly little histories and civilizations provide him with a calendar. ‘I’m on floor 22, room seven, chimp discovers fire’ that kind of deal.
“So he’s always been here?”
“From our perspective he has. He either evolved here, will evolve here, or some other kind of weirdness, an amalgamation of all creatures born to this planet in the past, present and future.”
“Dude!” said X.
“Yeah Dude!”
“But again, back to my original question, why you?” X asked.
“If I am not some sort of Oswald who will be left hanging with a wild assed story and no proof, it’d have to be my experiences with the esoteric knowledge,” Awbrey said.
“How so?”
“Our people were Welsh; superstitious, psychic, some of them. I have a feeling they knew on some level I have the background. It has to do with ancestors and so forth. Sometimes people have their ancestors sort of hanging around them, or in them, speaking to them and so on.
“My folks were big into all that knowledge,” Awbrey said.
“So, if…?”
“Right, your innate psychic abilities would be like a radio beacon to the dead of your kind. They would start speaking to you in one way or another, and I would be there to sort it out, explain to both you and your keepers what was happening to you,” Awbrey said.
“But you chose instead to bust me out of there,” X said.
“It wasn’t humane, the way you were living. That’s not a life. I couldn’t sit by and watch that happen, especially since….”
“Since what? Since I age so fast?”
“Something like that. I have to be straight with you, X. Cloning as we know it, has a way to go,” Awbrey said.
“Dolly the Sheep,” X said.
“Exactly, she aged too fast. It was like her genes knew how old she actually was,” Awbrey said.
“Or maybe Neander, owing to the exigencies of his hellish brutal life, had to age rapidly,” X said.
“There is that remote possibility,” Awbrey said.
“So your genius plan is, again, an appearance before congress, shock and awe,” X said.
“Yep,” Awbrey said.
“And knowing all that they know about you, unc, there isn’t the slightest chance they’ve predicted your next move?”
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Monday, October 5, 2009
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.
“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.
Friday, October 2, 2009
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 РTim Stanton sat inside the roadside caf̩ 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.
Nov. 17, 2014 Kissimmee Florida РTim Stanton sat inside the roadside caf̩ 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.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
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.”
(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.”
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