Scareforce

by Charles Hough

  What they didn’t expect to find was a ghost in the machine. But that is what happened.

  It started slowly and was not recognized for what it was for some time.

  The earliest occurrence took place after midnight in the console operations room. The room, and in fact the whole building, is entirely divorced from the outside. The total absence of windows prevents the occupants from determining the time or type of day. The carefully controlled temperature and humidity prevent any hint of what mother nature is brewing up outside. The hum of the machines is at first the most insistent sound and then, after acclimatization, an unnoticed background of white noise.

  Donaley, the mid-shift supervisor of the technician team, was seated in front of the console screen in a computer-induced trance. His eyes followed the random-appearing dance of alphanumerics across the screen. He was concentrating on the pattern, looking for the single bit that was not in step with the rest. The technician on the other side of the console squatted behind the open doors to the insides of the machine. He had been pulling and reseating the many computer boards to attempt to isolate the one that was causing the problem. He was totally hidden from Donaley’s view.

  Donaley’s concentration was interrupted by the bang of first one then the next equipment door slamming shut.

  “What’s the matter? You giving up?” He didn’t look up from the screen as he asked the question. The only answer he got was the third and final cabinet door slamming shut.

  “Did you pull all the boards?” asked Donaley. He rolled his chair back from the console and stretched. He had been locked into an uncomfortable position by his concentration. There was no answer from behind the console.

  “Hey, Ted, I asked if you pulled all the boards.” This time he raised his voice to be sure his counterpart heard him clearly. Still there was no reply.

  “Ted, what the hell’s the matter with you?”

  “I don’t know. What the hell’s the matter with you?”

  Donaley swung around violently in his chair. The voice came not from behind the console but from the door to the control room. Ted had apparently exited the room sometime earlier while Donaley was immersed in his inspection of the computer screen.

  Ted laughed at his boss’s stare and swung around the end of the console.

  “Hey, who closed all the cabinet doors?”

  Good question, thought Donaley. He was too shaken to speak.

  On another night not too long after the first, Donaley was seated at the same console, this time wearing a communications headset. Another technician had drawn the midnight shift and was ensconced in the flight station going through the radio circuits to try and track down a reported problem.

  “Pilot, radio one check.”

  “Rog, one checks.”

  “Pilot, radio two check.”

  “Rog, two checks.”

  “Pilot, HF check.”

  “Rog, HF checks.”

  The litany was monotonous and boring, but necessary. Donaley was in the midst of what must have been the nine millionth check when he was interrupted by a light tap on his shoulder.

  “Just a minute,” he waved the interruption off. “Let me finish this last check.”

  He heard a cross between a mutter and a whisper from behind his left shoulder but he couldn’t make out the words. Removing his headset, he swung around to face the person. There was no one in the room.

  Of course there was no one there. Donaley suddenly remembered that he and the technician were the only ones in the locked building that night.

  Donaley felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up as he tried to think who had touched him and whispered in his ear.

  Stories about the ghostly visitors started to circulate among the technicians. They found that several had had unexplained things happen to them individually. Most had been afraid to say anything. To paraphrase the poet, it’s better to say nothing and appear to be a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.

  But now that the shift super had let them know about his brushes with the supernatural, other happenings started to be told.

  A tech related his experience on the graveyard shift while he was working alone in the console room. The doors to the study and briefing rooms are held open by electromagnets as a fire safety precaution. If a fire breaks out, the power is removed from the building and the doors shut automatically to prevent the spread of fire. As he worked alone on the computer, suddenly one by one the doors to the rooms slammed shut. If power had been lost from the building, the doors should have shut all at once. But the power stayed on. He watched in shock as each door slammed in turn, right down the row. He then left the console room for a more brightly lit and heavily populated maintenance room.

  A stranger happening took place in the flight station itself. Dennis, one of the day technicians, was helping out the night crew with a persistent motion problem. He was “flying” the station while the other two techs monitored his progress at the console.

  When the box is under motion, its occupants are totally isolated from the room. To enter the station, you must cross a drawbridge that raises away when the motion system is activated. The station then lifts up on its legs to prepare to simulate the flight. The occupants are now suspended twelve feet above the floor. Anyone on the outside of the station would prevent the station’s rise. The catwalk is covered with a pressure sensitive flooring that inhibits motion, and lights a warning light at the console to show when anyone steps on the station or even touches it. So Dennis was completely isolated from others as he flew the plane above the computer earth.

  The gentle rocking motion of the simulator and the background noise of the jets worked in unison to lull him. He was almost dozing when suddenly a hand slapped the back of his head. It was the kind of slap a pilot would use to jump-start his copilot’s brain when he botched something.

  It definitely got Dennis’s brain working. He punched the emergency stop, shutting off the power to the system, ripped off his seat belt, and bolted for the door. He almost pitched over the railing. The drawbridge had not yet dropped in place. He was on it and running for the steps before the pumps had released all the pressure. His faith in modern machines was somewhat shaken. But the best was yet to come.

  Friday night is the only night that the trainer is completely shut down. The process of turning it off is involved and must be followed exactly to prevent damage to the components.

  Ted and Ron were working in the flight station as Jerry worked outside the building to clean up the area. Ted was shutting down the pilot’s side as Ron did the same with the copilot’s side. The windows were blank. They had already turned off the computer that produced the visuals. Suddenly the window blossomed with a picture of the runway at Minot.

  “Wonder why Jerry turned on the visuals?” asked Ted. “You finish up here and I’ll go see what’s happening.”

  He left to check on the computer room. He was surprised to find the visual computer working away but the room totally empty of human beings. He tracked Jerry down in the maintenance shed, where he was laboring to store a garden tractor. Jerry followed him back to the bay to see what was going on.

  Ron was standing on the catwalk of the flight station as they entered the bay. He just shrugged his shoulders when they told him they didn’t know how the visuals came back on.

  “You two go ahead and pull the plug on the computers and I’ll police up the console room,” he said.

  They went into the supercooled computer room and started the process that removed all power from the banked computers. As the thinking machine slowly ground down, the silence became overwhelming. When the last switch had been thrown, they reentered the bay.

  Above them, on the catwalk, Ron was standing in the door to the flight station. He appeared to be frozen to the spot.

  “I thought you guys were going to turn everything off?” He yelled the question to the men below without turning from his perusal of the flight station.

  “W
hat d’ya mean? We did,” answered Ted. “It’s dead as a doornail.”

  “Dead, huh?” Ron turned from the doorway. His face was white and his eyes were wide.

  “Maybe you better come up here and take a look at this then.”

  The two technicians bolted up the stairs and into the flight station. There they stared at a technological impossibility. For the flight station was anything but dead. Without the benefit of software or computers or even electrical power the station was up and ready to go. All the lights blazed, all the gauges registered, all the dials moved. The sound of eight powerful simulated engines poured from the speakers. The windows glowed with the scene of the runway stretched out in front of the plane, clear and ready for the next flight.

  But who was going to make that flight?

  The three men locked and left the building. According to the laws of electricity as they knew them, the simulator was completely shut down. If someone or something was running the computers with different laws, they were content to let them have at it.

  Much conjecture has been expended concerning the ghost of the simulator. A ghost is usually tied to a place from his past or a place where he died. But the sim is completely new and modern. It was built of new and sterile parts. The building was constructed for the sole purpose of housing the simulator. Even the ground that it sits on has no history that would attract a spirit. As far back as can be determined, the land was vacant, first as prairie, then as farmland, and finally as a vacant lot on an Air Force base.

  There is only one part of the simulator that was not constructed originally for its use, and therein may lie the answer. While the flight station looks like an airplane on the inside, the outside only needs to look like a box. And for the most part it does. But the designer was given the opportunity to add some flare to the device. Old models of the B-52 were retired and, after years of faithful service, were on their way to the smelter to be recycled into newer vehicles. He was able to rescue at least part of one of the old Buffs (Big Ugly Fat Fellows) and incorporate it into the modern simulator. The skin covering the cockpit and windows was removed and included on the flight station nose.

  Maybe this piece of the old war bird held more than metal and glass and plastic and rubber. Maybe it was the home of something long dormant and resting. Maybe the simulation aroused it, attracted it, and now amuses it.

  Or maybe another type of Air Force just needs the practice.

  WHITE CHIEF

  AS a young man sitting nuclear alert, I never really felt the enormity of my situation until one incident brought it all into perspective. We were on alert at a West Coast base when a computer in the early warning system made a mistake. As a result of the glitch we almost launched the fleet. After that I knew the meaning of real fear. Sometimes the known is worse than the unknown.

  What’s the scariest place you can think of? Think it’s an old, ramshackle Psycho-like mansion with an infamous past and an unsavory present? The kind that you joke about with your friends at school, scaring and daring and parading your courage? But your bragging freezes in your imagination as you pass the house on the far side of the street. You know that the undoubtedly haunted hovel will star in your dreams. Is that your idea of frightening?

  Maybe you grew up on splatter flicks and movie special effects creatures. No scary old house for your nightmares. You need alien claws and technoshock surroundscare to get your teeth chattering. Only Freddy’s smile can call up your chills.

  Let me tell you of a scarier place. A place that demands your attention and can steal your breath and your heartbeat in a fraction of a whimper. How about living and working in the exact center of a bull’s-eye? It’s not visible and it’s not always the same size but it’s always there and it’s very real. One more thing. It’s got the most powerful, deadly, devastating weapon ever dreamed of aimed right at its heart.

  This place is an Air Force base in the heart of the heartland. That means it’s in a place that’s not very populated and definitely not a must-see on the jet set tour.

  Grand Forks Air Force Base is located near the Red River Valley of that great and frozen state of North Dakota. The “Forks” is not a major base as military bases go, but it has major standing in another league. It’s a senior stalwart in the coldest of battles. It is armed with weapons of Armageddon proportion. Its nuclear arsenal is formidable. An astute observer noticed that North Dakota, given sovereign status, would become the third largest nuclear power in the world.

  Generations of warriors assigned to this base went about their careers and their lives in the middle of this bull’s-eye. The enemy knew of them and their power. They were required by command and by law to feign ignorance of their own power to the public. “I can neither confirm nor deny that,” was the only statement they could make. But they knew the weapons were there. And their enemy knew that the weapons were there. And they knew the enemy had trained his own doomsday device at them. So they lived and worked and played and slept in the bull’s-eye, never certain of anything except their duty.

  The fear was there. It was a constant undercurrent that seasoned their lives. And it wasn’t just the fear of what their enemy would do if given the chance. It was also the fear of what they could do to themselves if they weren’t very careful and very good.

  They knew they were living on time not borrowed but wrested from a cruel fate. Years before, when the weapons were new and the threat was new and computers were new and filled whole buildings, a private company was asked to look at the fledgling nuclear force. The brass were concerned about the growing number of accidents involving nuclear weapons.

  They went outside their carefully groomed force to a company famed for objectivity and analytical skill. They asked them to study, delve, question, and observe. And they asked them to ask their big-as-a-house computing machine two questions.

  The first was, “Will we have an accident resulting in a nuclear detonation?” And the second was only to be asked if the first resulted in a yes. It was, simply, “When?“

  The company dug and worked and gathered and finally fed all their careful study to the computer. And they asked the first question. Without hesitation the electronic oracle said, “Yes.“

  The company personnel who fed data into the new thinking machine suddenly lost some of their celebrated objectivity. The machine that they served and to some degree worshiped, had just predicted death on a monumental scale.

  Fearfully, then, they prepared the second question. The tubes glowed and the wires vibrated as the metal mind contemplated the question. Then it unfurled a strip of paper from an orifice.

  The scientists took the answer from their creation. Afraid to look yet afraid of not knowing, they unraveled the answer. As if in jest, the machine had named a range of dates for the catastrophe. But the dates were for five years in the past. It took a moment for the implication to soak in. The computer was telling them that they were living on borrowed time. The event could take place at almost any moment unless something changed to avert it.

  This information was rushed to the military officials who had ordered the study. For the first time in peacetime the military command did not hesitate. They called in all the safety and security experts they could find and began the task of redesigning the control of these weapons of mass destruction.

  The basic rules they formulated for the protection of these most-destructive of weapons have survived for over thirty years. It is a credit to the rules that the country that houses the weapons has survived also.

  Those rules continue to guide the guardians of atomic weapons. The Strategic Air Command, the central figure of the nuclear triad, is the guardian of most of the nuclear weapons on American soil.

  If you have ever been on a SAC base, you will know that they take their control of these weapons seriously.

  At a base like Grand Forks, the reminders start when you cross the boundary of the base. Or when you attempt to cross the boundary. No one gets on the base without the express consent o
f the base commander. That consent comes in the form of documents, orders and such. Everything must be in order.

  After you enter the base, security doesn’t let up. In fact it gets tighter the nearer you get to the weapons. A Strategic Air Command base has two distinct police forces. There’s the normal type that you would expect in any community. The law enforcement group handles the routine police business of the base. They patrol the streets, handing out moving violations and parking tickets where needed. They protect the businesses on base and make sure that everything runs smoothly and legally.

  But there’s another police force that few know of. Its job is to guard the weapons of mass destruction. Its members apply the rules that came from that early study. They enforce those rules strictly. They know that everyone is living on borrowed time. The job must be done right or the sword of Damocles will fall as predicted. They are dead serious about their work.

  As you get closer to the areas where the weapons rest, the control becomes ominous. You see the tall fences, not one but rows of them. The area in between is sterile and swept. If you knew a little about the job, you would be chilled to learn that these well-maintained spaces between the fences are called killing zones.

  Look closer at the fences. They are topped not by normal barbed wire but by something unique. It looks like the concertina wire used in Vietnam but it’s different. It’s flat and sharpened. It’s called razor wire by the troops and is so deadly that we are restricted by wartime conventions from using it on foreign soil.

  Move a little closer and you start to see the signs. If you can get close enough to read one, you will see phrases like “no unauthorized entry,” and “express written permission of the command authority,” and “use of deadly force is authorized.“

  But if you can get close enough to read the signs, it has already been determined that you have a legitimate reason to be there. The security guards have methods of surveillance that even the people who work there have no knowledge of. They are dead serious in their work.