by Paul Hughes
“But—Where are you—”
“Wyo—Fuck. Sorry, can’t give you details.” He stooped to give her an absent-minded hug, stood, then bent down again to kiss her cheek. “I’m sorry, it’s work. You look beautiful tonight.” He cradled her cheek in his hand.
“Okay, well, when will you be—”
“Don’t know. Listen, there’s transport waiting. I have to—I’m sorry. I’ll see you soon, I promise.” He turned and walked away, not thinking of anything but “work.”
Hope Benton sat at the table until the bottle of wine arrived. The server poured her a glass, but when he’d left, she filled it to the top.
Wyoming?
She wondered if she would see James Richter again.
In the fall of 2021, some things happened.
David Smith Jennings, on leave from Milicom Arlington, visited the childhood home of his friend Gregory Bates in Roanoke, Virginia, with their fellow officers Antonia Cervera, Michael Balfour and James Richter. The Bates family home, a sprawling manse in the Neo-Plantation style, became the site of a weekend party before the Milicom soldiers had to return to base for a silver anniversary memorial. The Mayflower Hills Bates estate overlooked a tributary of the Roanoke River, and it was on those banks that one Robert Ray “Buddy” McClure attempted to rape young Lieutenant Cervera as the party raged on just behind them. McClure, a vagrant from Harkness, Michigan, who for almost a year had been hitching the east coast, making a living from itinerant roofing, and who had in fact been hired by the Bates family to renovate the roof of their guest house, suffered a fractured collar bone from Cervera’s self-defense, but still managed to successfully sodomize his victim after knocking her unconscious with a rock.
Upon waking her hung-over colleagues the next morning and contacting the authorities, Cervera was able to successfully identify her attacker from a police lineup. McClure had been found and detained just hours after the rape by the Roanoke PD on drunk and disorderly charges.
Because crimes against Milicom personnel were federal offenses, the McClure rape case went before the federal court located in Roanoke. Judge Hannah Kilbourne oversaw the case. Attorney Abrah Allen-Kennedy acted as McClure’s defense attorney. Allen-Kennedy, with the star power of her lineage and the sheer brilliance of her academic career, having graduated high school at age eight, Colgate at twelve and OU Law at fourteen, drew a crowd of several thousand reporters to the Roanoke courthouse. The proceedings were broadcast live on Court TV 1-7.
No one was really surprised when Allen-Kennedy secured McClure’s release with a not-guilty verdict.
The once-close friendship between Milicom colleagues David Jennings and Antonia Cervera effectively ended once Jennings revealed that he was dating Allen-Kennedy, whom he had met at a Roanoke bar on the last day of court proceedings in the McClure trial.
Hounded by paparazzi as they left the bar, Jennings and Allen-Kennedy ducked into a toy store on the next block. In the back, stacked between displays of Let’s Eat Meat Elmo and Mistress Beasley dolls, Jennings found twenty small stuffed bears. Their design was charming in its simplicity, and the lack of a plastic nose nub gave the toys a humble demeanor. Jennings purchased one of the bears for the giggling lawyer. Outside of the store, he ripped the Honeybear Brown tag from the bear’s ear.
She held his hand as they flagged down a cab and returned to her hotel.
They watched the hotel room television under the preface of “just hanging out,” but the show didn’t hold either of their interests. They seemed more interested in exploring each other, and after half an hour, Jennings turned the “Hank the Cowboy” show off with the remote in his right hand as his left made the daring jump beneath Allen-Kennedy’s black silk thong.
Network executives from CBS cancelled “Hank the Cowboy” the next week, citing demographic analyses that showed that even the rapidly-fading Boomer generation was sick of CGI retro-dramas. The program spent the next three years bouncing between the E!, Comedy Central and Sci Fi networks before being shelved for good. Unfortunately, all surviving digital copies and source material for the series were lost in the cave-in of a secure archive facility in Wind River, Wyoming, along with three original James McNeill Whistler paintings and an original paper copy of Paul Evan Hughes’s silverthought trilogy.
These things happen.
“Cunt!”
Les Harris, creator and former screenwriter for the “Hank the Cowboy” series, threw the framed photograph of his wife at the wall link. The frame snapped, the glass shattered, but the only damage to the link was a small divot the frame’s corner had inscribed into the plastic face. Harris went into the basement, unlocked his handgun from its safe, and shot himself in the right temple because his wife had decided to leave him after hearing that “Hank” had been cancelled and CBS was terminating Les’s contract.
“Cunt!”
Jealous co-worker Sandra Chappelle pushed Sugar Williams to the ground in an alley off of 7th Avenue and wiped Williams’ blood from her swishblade with a used tissue. Chappelle remembered friendly discussions over hurried lunches about starting a new toy line with Williams. When Sugar took Sandra’s “Honeybear Brown” design and secured a lucrative deal with Mattel, and when every tabloid in every newsstand in the city broadcast a photograph of Abrah Allen-Kennedy running from the photog with a Honeybear in tow, someone had to die.
“Cunt!”
Antonia Cervera remembered the word she’d spoken to Abrah Allen-Kennedy after she’d gotten rapist Buddy McClure off. Months later, Cervera saw Kennedy walking with David Jennings in downtown Arlington, their hands held. Already furious about the rumors that her former friend and that bitch lawyer were engaged, this seeming-confirmation of a relationship pushed her over the edge, and as the happy couple walked by, Cervera lashed out, swiping two deep, two shallow nail marks across the left side of the lawyer’s face. Cervera flicked the tiny bits of face from underneath her fingernails and spit at Jennings, who knocked her to the sidewalk with a reflex right hook.
Fourteen years later, standing as Jennings was sworn into presidential office, Cervera saw the faint, poorly-concealed lines on the impending First Lady’s face. She smiled. Forgiveness only goes so far. Abrah was still a cunt.
The site command center was situated in a volcanic bubble seven miles beneath the surface. Jennings noted the fresh fill of quickcrete that composed the center’s floor. Scientists, soldiers: the room hummed with activity, but that hum quieted to a tickling underwhine as he entered and three dozen people turned to salute.
“As you were.” He approached the main display in at the bubble’s core. “Show me.”
Cervera nodded to three technicians. Lights dimmed and the projector spun to life.
“Jesus fuck.” Jennings knew his whisper wasn’t quite.
The design was simple: a flattened-egg hub connected two rounded triangular nacelles. The slowly-rotating display indicated breaches in the hulls of both “wings” where molten rock had infiltrated the form. The wings had presumably once pointed to sharp tips, but both had been sheared away in asymmetrical impact. Rock had filled the vessel with earthen cancer.
“How old?”
“Preliminary estimates? Sixty, seventy million years.”
Everything we know is wrong; everything we know isn’t.
“I get the distinct impression you’ve been hiding something from me, Tony.”
She hesitated. The command center filled with glances, cleared throats, busywork.
“Tell me.”
“David—It’s superblack. Need-to-know. We don’t—”
“Override.”
“I can’t—”
“Override, before I lose my temper. Named orders?”
“President Holmdel, but it’s deeper than that. It’s old.”
“Let me guess... Truman? Eisenhower? Override superblack. Release. I assume we’re all friends here?”
“They’re cleared.”
Jennings smirked. “Phantom government strik
es again. Am I really the Commander-in-Chief?”
“David—”
“We’ve got a UFO in our soil. That’s some serious Chariots of the Gods shit. I think that makes me need-to-know. Holmdel’s dead.”
Cervera nodded and gestured toward the display’s touchpad. “Bloody up.”
Jennings’ eyes drew to slits, the line of sight between their eyes unbroken as he placed his palm on the machine surface. “Do it.”
“System, add user: Jennings, David Smith. President. Authorization: Cervera, Antonia. War Sec. Run: Holmdel Directive, re: Von Daniken, subsystems Peru, Bolivia: Nazca, Titicaca. Superblack release: mark.”
Jennings gritted his teeth as the sampler scraped genetic confirmation from his palm.
“Learn something new every day.”
“David—”
“Tell me.”
You want a story? I’ll tell you a story. I’ll tell you about Lago Titicaca, our HQ in La Paz, the three-chip whores just begging for a soldado americano quente’s company. Holmdel had been in office just six years when we found the pieces. After the annexation. Before the shit found the fan. Looking at that chamber under the mountain, I remembered. Why hadn’t we at least tried to piece the puzzle back together? I’ll tell you. Bodies. Dated to around sixty-five. Not age. Million years. Thousands of skeletons scattered throughout the lakebed, across the rocky plateau, between potato fields and Bolivia and Peru.
It’s dry. Freezing. That helped us date and sequence the bones. A million bones, a thousand patterns, each clavicle, each femur, each rib not scavenged by the Pucara or the Tihuanaco for their war gowns, each bone systematically rewrote our history and dented my lifelong assumption that I, James Richter, was a descendant of the cradle of man. I knew then no such privilege; those patterns were in all of us, in each and every one of us.
Imagine the impact: that ship who knows how fast, uncontrolled, damaged already, from what we saw in Wyoming. It left pieces across Uruguay, a few in Argentina, and the jackpot in Peru. Never found bigger pieces north. Guess we didn’t look hard enough. Or maybe shedding the pattern cache over Titicaca gave the ship just enough juice to try to escape. Didn’t make it. Welcome to America, ancient astronauts.
I shouldn’t tell you—Guess it doesn’t really matter. The author will probably edit this out if he ever gets his shit together and finishes this, but remember Benton? She put the pieces back together. Not the ship, but the pieces of me, all of those convenient assumptions that’d been shattered by my time in Peru. How’s a man supposed to keep a secret like that? Hey everyone, guess what. Everything you thought you knew about where we came from was wrong. There’re people just like us out there, and sixty-fucking-five million years ago, they paid us a visit. Left behind enough survivors to start this.
So the first time I saw the light, I was reasonably unreasonably afraid.
Holmdel superblacked the whole affair. Non-disclosure agreements all around, not that they could’ve done anything about it, not really, not to a man whose parents were dead and whose gee eff had been briefed on the surfaces before they’d even pulled out. I don’t think she believed it. Maths don’t care about evolution beyond its opposition to creationism.
The point is, no one could explain it, so they buried it and buried our eyescatch under penalty of death. Big threat. I was born dead. No paperwork necessary.
The way I see it, the bird dumped half its cargo over Titicaca after starting to bring them back. That’s the bodies. Imagine the biggest cemetery you’ve ever seen, but in this boneyard, the people were just thrown on the ground. No bodies at Diablo; I think they didn’t have time, or the damage was too severe to do that wing. Just dumped one wing, that coned-out ball with the human-shaped depressions in the walls. Some survived. If they hadn’t, we’d all be talking Kiswahili. Si jambo.
Jennings had Holmdel and his administration disappeared after the Populace coup. Buried under buried under buried. And after most of the southern hemisphere got glassed in the Quebec War (oops!), there goes a little thing called plausible deniability. Deniable plausibility? Not that he needed to know, but maybe things would’ve been different. Maybe the last centuries of my life wouldn’t have been spent thousands of years in the future, trying to fix this fucking mess. Guess I could take the blame, but why bother? Purpose be.
The point is, there’s more to this story than you’ll ever know.
“The agent in charge—”
“James Richter.”
“What?” A ghost rattled chains in Jennings’ attic. “Richter? From—”
“He was on your list to disappear,” Cervera paused, “but we took him off.”
“Any other undeletes I should know about?”
“A few. David, we just couldn’t—”
“I understand.” He didn’t. “We’re bringing him in?”
“Called him up. He’s in transit. I’m sure he’ll jump at the chance to puzzle a few more pieces together.”
A nobody chimed in. “Sirs, the entry team is prepped and ready.”
“Nothing’s alive in there…?”
“Nothing on scope. Just one big flickering power source in the vessel’s core.”
“Reactor?”
“Maybe.”
“Bomb?”
“...Could be.”
“Send them in. We have visual?” Jennings sat on the edge of an empty chair.
“Eyelines installed. Ready to roll.”
“Tell them to go, then.”
Assault Force A was hardly fit for assault, hardly a force, but they were completely qualified for the “A” position, a group of men and women impressed into Milicom after being particularly good convicts, patients, and ne’er do wells with nowhere else to go.
They weren’t issued guns.
Moore Chavez rubbed his eyes with gloved fingers, for a moment obscuring both the signal from Eyeline-17-A and the two teardrop prison tattoos a man he’d later raped and shivved had needled into his upper cheeks. He added that murder one artist to the tally he kept on his right thumb.
A romantic at heart, Chavez thought the rock seemingly growing from the metal hallway around him was beautiful. He held his spotlight like a gun, so far outside his conception of reality now than any reassuring contact with metal helped his feet move.
A lattice of passages, he followed the other members of A down what appeared to be a main shaft, his rubber soles grasping for purchase on the canted floor. Whoever had designed this bunker had a bad eye for level lines. Maybe it was art.
Up ahead, the hallway ended at a swingdoor. He thought it’d be the end of the line, but he saw that douche Monagan successfully pull the door’s halves apart. Someone had left it unlocked for them.
He watched Monagan take a few steps forward, his light back and forth, before he tumbled and disappeared, his shout of surprise interrupting the mortuary silence of the expedition.
People ran. A few more fell.
By the time Chavez got to the front, people had stopped falling, instead stood out on a landing within the chamber. The talking stopped even more.
“What’s the—Jesus.” He crossed himself.
The double-dozen spotlights swished around the chamber in near-solid lines. Even at the bottom of the room, the three men and one woman who had fallen were sitting up, their lights arcing forth and back across the expanse.
They’d fallen off the landing and slid harmlessly down a big metal bowl, slight depressions in its surface. Above, the room’s ceiling was that same bowl, mirrored. They were inside a gigantic sphere, or “spear,” as Chavez would have pronounced it.
At the center of the room, exact center, hung a dull gray orb. Free-floating. Just sitting there in the air. The four fallen soon realized there was nothing attached to that ball, and they tried to climb up the bowl’s slick sides, lest it fall on them.
“Fuck,” Moore Chavez said to no one.
“Fuck,” David Smith Jennings said to Antonia Cervera.
“Are we seeing this
right?” She turned to an engineer running the playback. “Is that thing floating?”
“I—I don’t know, sir.” He zoomed. “Looks like—”
The screens became white.
Moore Chavez quickly yanked the melting communications band from his head, tried to slap out a dozen burning holes on his uniform. His eyes stung from the blackened, smoldering plastic. He found himself on his ass, slammed up against the back of the railing rim.
The room was brighter. He realized that the new illumination was coming from the nearest unsteady light at the chamber’s center, the floating ball of whatever the fuck.
He grappled with his own disoriented body and crawled to the edge of the walkway, looked down into the bowl. The four members of Assault A at the bowl’s bottom weren’t moving. Others around him were. More moaning and confused cries than moving.
“Hey,” he barely whispered down the bowl, but still it felt too loud. “You guys alright?”
He’d never forget the look on the woman’s face at the bottom of the chamber. Her mouth hung open and his beam revealed a wet line of spittle looping out. Her eyes were gray, and he wondered how he could possibly know from that distance, but
the floating ball flashed again, not as brightly, or maybe it was and he’d adjusted, but Chavez thought he saw a passageway open directly across the expanse, a passageway exactly like the one he’d used to enter the chamber. With the flash came a great tendril of energy that lashed out, down that passage. At the same time, the four people at the bottom of the bowl began to fly up. He didn’t believe it, but they did, flew up, flew through the floating ball of purest white light, a thin stream of their constituent parts splashing out the other side, guided down that passage, and then he died as he was pulled in and through and
“Assault A, come in.” The command center was a fury of chatter. “Assault A, report.”