“I was afraid you’d say that,” Gabby replied. “Show Jack a cliff and he’ll be the first to leap off it.”
“That may be so, but never without a parachute,” he countered.
“Or a really large umbrella,” Grant said, eager to get in a Mary Poppins reference whenever he could.
One by one, each gave their consent, including Eugene, who stammered through his own reluctant approval.
Jack regarded a beleaguered Grant and an uneasy-looking Dag. “Tick, tock,” he told them, before pushing on ahead.
Chapter 32
Mia was trying to do two things at once and failing badly at both. One part of her was hunting for recognizable words through pages and pages filled with blocks of random letters.
Meanwhile, another part of her was scrolling through a source of informational chaff. In this case, it was coming from the talking heads on TV who were working themselves into a frenzy. More than once she wondered why she didn’t just turn the damn thing off, which in turn revealed a salient reality most of us faced at one time or another in today’s age of information overload—turning it off meant disconnecting yourself from the outside world.
Based on what the major cable news channels were saying, social media had been inundated by a veritable cesspool of unfounded information and conspiracy theories. So many voices were speculating about the alien craft, who had built it and for what purpose that it made drawing any logical conclusions nearly impossible.
If the reports of an alien object were true, it was no doubt the most important story in human history, a discovery that only served to highlight several of humankind’s most enduring questions. And not simply the old chestnut about whether or not we were alone in the universe. For Mia, it got to the heart of something far deeper. Namely, who were we? How had we gotten here? And what was our purpose, assuming there was one?
For thousands of years—maybe hundreds of thousands—humans had not only pondered these questions, but attempted to fill in the answers as best they could. To our ancestors, lightning was seen as the anger of the gods, or a punishment for perceived sins. During the Enlightenment, with God removed from the equation entirely, Zeus’ lightning bolts had been reduced to the discharge of electrons which superheated the air.
As we continued our inevitable march into the future, our understanding would no doubt evolve. The point was, for a long, long time, we used artistic license to fill in the blank spots in our knowledge in order to fend off the delicious sense of fear that always accompanied the unknown. But the next part of what she saw on TV was where Mia had really been surprised. Although small pockets of the social media world were doing their best to spread fear, the bulk of humanity not only seemed open to the idea of alien contact, they eagerly awaited meeting beings from another world.
Since the first news stories broke, thousands of people in cities all across the globe had taken to the streets with signs which read ‘Welcome back, E.T.,’ ‘Love thy neighbor’ and ‘If Kirk liked ’em green, why shouldn’t we?’
Then there was Mia’s personal favorite, a guy with red hotpants and a t-shirt proclaiming: ‘Please probe me!’
In a rather heartwarming way, it didn’t seem to matter to those assembling in the streets with a message of unity that so much uncertainty still surrounded that initial announcement. The Army denied that any such alien discovery had been made, while the Navy would neither confirm nor deny the story. For its part, the Air Force, along with the White House, refused to comment.
Back on TV, the media had switched from the throngs pouring into Times Square in New York and Trafalgar Square in London to a panel of two astrophysicists and a disgruntled-looking head of SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). Long ago, SETI had decided the best chances of finding life beyond the solar system lay in detecting radio signals emanating from a distant star. To this end, they’d built the Allen Telescope Array, a group of radio telescopes set up in Northern California. But in forty-plus years of searching, they had come up empty, which explained the rather sour look on the SETI guy’s face. Even the host couldn’t help but see the irony in looking far out into space for something that had been on earth all along.
And the disagreements didn’t stop there, especially when it came to the strange pulsing lights that growing swaths of the planet’s population had experienced twice already. The first time, the light had only touched sections of North and South America. But this second blast had gone much further, engulfing the entire planet. It didn’t require much imagination to speculate that it too was somehow connected to the alien object the military had recently found. The timing made it impossible to ignore. Connected or not, the location of the object was still a closely held secret.
Both of the astrophysicist commentators were confident that satellites would soon be able to confirm whether the blasts were originating from outer space or from here on earth. If it was coming from somewhere outside, they said, an unusual solar event might be to blame. Or perhaps it was incoming messages from the alien home world. From there, each subsequent suggestion got more and more preposterous. But if the lights were originating from the surface of the planet itself, then they would be at a complete loss to explain how such a force was being generated and, more importantly, what effect it was having. Mia’s own sense was that NASA already knew the source of the flashes and was keeping it a secret.
The final segment was a discussion with a panel of doctors from around the United States, all of them complaining about a sudden and dramatic rise in emergency room visits. Although few of the ailments had been life-threatening, all of them were life-altering. They ranged from porous bones, to sensitivity to the sun, mental impairments and rapid ageing. Perfectly healthy individuals were suddenly being struck down and left to wither away. If the doctors on TV had any idea Salzburg was somehow involved, they didn’t say.
The host was about to cut to a reporter in the field when Ollie suddenly jumped up and shouted. The fright nearly made Mia spill her coffee over the papers strewn before her.
“I got something here,” he cried, circling the words on the page.
Mia glanced down at those three simple words in a sea of gobbledygook and felt a cold hand move up the backs of her legs.
Chapter 33
MAN MUST FALL
All three of them stood staring at the words, their minds a witch’s brew of thoughts and fears.
Mia and Armoni had worked through their respective piles without finding more than two nonsensical words next to one another. Ollie’s discovery, on the other hand, was both simple and chilling. Had those three words been what Alan and others had died for? What some shadowy group wished to possess at all costs?
“What do you make of it?” Mia asked.
“Hard to tell,” Armoni said. “From here it looks like a case of apophenia, if you ask me.”
Ollie looked shaken. “Apo-what? You wanna fill the rest of us knuckleheads in?”
“Uh, speak for yourself,” Mia shot back. “Apophenia is the tendency to see patterns and connections even when they don’t exist. It’s got something to do with how our brains are wired.”
Ollie raised an eyebrow. “So you think these three words were just a coincidence?”
“Maybe,” Mia conceded. “Or maybe the message is real. Either way, I have to admit, the meaning behind the statement is rather vague.”
“Maybe it is to you,” he countered, “but to me it’s about as clear as a vodka martini.” He pointed to the TV screen where they were once again showing the leaked video of the supposed USO. “It’s clearly a threat. Made by them.”
Mia was trying hard not to jump to conclusions. “Wait a second. Let’s back up a bit. It was only three years ago that Dr. Alan Salzburg and his team discovered the genetic anomaly characterized by the appearance of an extra human chromatid.”
“Maybe they created it,” Armoni said, tossing out an idea even she didn’t seem sold on.
Mia shook her head. “Not a chance. In
their peer-reviewed research paper they were able to trace the emergence of the disorder to the mid-nineties. Well over twenty years ago. We didn’t have the knowledge or the technology to pull something like that off. Even now, Salzburg’s ability to integrate into an adult human body is light years ahead of the artificial chromosomes we’ve only recently come up with in the lab.”
“The fall of man,” Ollie said, mostly to himself. “Sounds almost biblical.”
Mia held up her hands, worried they might be jumping to conclusions far too quickly. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
Ollie was far from interested in stepping back. “You said yourself this Salzburg thing is way beyond anything we’re capable of. Can’t you just admit that it’s somehow connected to that giant UFO they found?”
For Mia, it was a difficult leap to make, perhaps one she didn’t want to make, but she couldn’t offer an alternate view that accounted for everything that was happening. “We know that Salzburg syndrome got worse after the first blast. What caused that? We don’t know. Maybe it was merely a coincidence. Or maybe something else is causing the disorder to show up in people.”
“See how you tie yourself in knots to explain away the things that make you uncomfortable?” Ollie said, waving the paper around. “Haven’t you considered that maybe that thing is what’s generating the pulse? If so, then it’s not too far-fetched to think that maybe, just maybe the alien relic or whatever it is is changing us in ways we don’t completely understand. For all we know it’s part of a plan for them to wipe us out or take control of our minds.”
“Most who see those three words are likely to imagine the worst,” Mia said, trying to stay focused on the facts as they understood them. “You may be among them, whereas I see it as a call to change how we’re living.”
Ollie scoffed.
“Don’t laugh. Maybe it’s telling us we have to stop acting like we’re somehow separate from the natural order. It doesn’t say ‘MAN WILL DIE’ or ‘WE’RE ABOUT TO DESTROY MANKIND.’”
“Sure, maybe they didn’t spell out every little detail,” Ollie argued.
“What I don’t understand,” Armoni said, “is how these aliens knew anything about ASCII or the English language?”
Mia and Ollie regarded her with blank expressions.
“I mean, the binary part makes sense,” she went on. “Zero and one are basic principles of mathematics, so are prime numbers. I’ve read my fair share of articles on the challenges of communicating with an alien civilization. I guess one of the perks of being online all day long is you come across some really weird stuff. Maybe they’ve been watching us for a long time, knew everything about how we live and communicate…” Her voice trailed off.
“You mentioned something earlier,” Mia said. “You were talking about the encryption on the USB. You said you’d seen it before.”
She hesitated and ran her right hand down the side of her pant leg. “Yeah, I used to be part of a crew called the White Knights. Our MO was to break into government servers and see what we could find. We were looking for anything from who killed JFK to alien cover-ups and everything in between. I gained access using a rather simple phishing scam designed to get usernames and passwords from contractors working for the CIA. If you think the brightest minds are immune to a fake email from an irate IT administrator, you’d be dead wrong. Anyway, once inside, I trolled around for two full days before they knew I was even there. Didn’t find anything about aliens or JFK, but I did find lots about a group called Sentinel.”
“Sentinel?” Mia asked. She’d never heard the name before. Ollie was also curious.
“They had the CIA worried,” she said. “That was what caught my attention and kept me reading. Turns out, Sentinel is a group of powerful men determined to squash any possible contact between humans and extraterrestrials. They apparently formed sometime in the 1940s when UFO sightings were becoming more and more commonplace. But it wasn’t to help hide any crashed saucer. They were convinced that if humans ever encountered an alien race—peaceful or not—such a meeting would lead to our destruction.
“They began as a group of a dozen men, calling themselves the Majestic Twelve on account of the top-secret clearance they held. But soon others were brought in, tycoons and industrialists. They were men who had a stake in maintaining the status quo. But never politicians. No one who could be bought off, or bent to the will of the people. They worked behind the scenes, wielding great power.
“Soon the name Majestic no longer fit and the group became known as Sentinel. Today, new faces have replaced the old, but their commitment is the same. I found other stuff too, scary documents about the organization’s paramilitary arm—the people who did their dirty work, soldiers and assassins.” Armoni’s face was ashen. “If this threat is as real as you think it is, then the Brazilian police aren’t the ones you should be worried about.”
Chapter 34
Grant’s pace was slow but steady as they descended three more levels. Between them and the Orb lay plenty of ship and at least a dozen floors. They could spend a decade on board without unraveling all of the craft’s secrets. Dag was in the lead, followed by Grant. Jack brought up the rear, if for no other reason than to keep an eye on the biologist, who was too damned proud to know when enough was enough.
They were quiet as they plumbed deeper into the depths of the ship. Any concerns Jack held about a fresh blast wave sending the ship plummeting into the magma chamber beneath them came a distant second to finding answers to three main questions. Namely, who built this ship, where had they come from and, perhaps most important of all, what was it doing here?
“Hold up,” Dag said, stopping suddenly.
Straight ahead was an archway, eight feet tall and wide enough for two grown men to pass through comfortably at the same time. Dag directed his lights beyond the threshold.
“I see something,” he stammered.
Jack pressed forward, past Grant. He spotted the object at once, lying at an angle by the entrance to the room. It didn’t appear to be part of a machine or an errant tool left on the floor. This was clearly something organic.
“What do you think it is?” Grant asked, breathing hard.
“I’m not sure,” Jack replied, his eyes locked on the object. Carefully, so as not to disturb anything, he stepped no more than two feet into the room and bent down next to it. Grant and Dag followed suit. They remained in place for a while, staring, trying to make sense of what they were seeing. Jack’s initial impressions were about color and texture. Dark brown, as thin as a child’s arm and shriveled. But beyond that, it was long, two meters, maybe a little more and folded in half as though spring-loaded. Tiny hairs protruded along the length of it. At one end was a rounded edge—was it a socket?—and on the other a smaller fold, this one containing three narrow digits.
They were looking at what appeared to be the mummified arm of an alien creature. Did it belong to whoever built this ship or was this one of their pets, or maybe a meal?
Grant rose to his feet, sweat dotting his forehead and streaming down his face. A fat salty drop rolled into his eye and he blinked it painfully away, his lights flickering on and off with every third beat of his left lid.
“Take a deep breath,” Jack told him. “This is what you’ve been waiting for your entire life.”
Grant backed away, breathing hard, and Jack wasn’t sure if the biologist was really panicking or if the blisters on his face were somehow to blame. Then without warning, Grant’s lights jerked as the heel of his boot struck something, sending him falling backwards.
Jack sprang to his feet and as he did, a row of soft red lights slowly peeled away the darkness from above.
Grant sat on the floor, his arms bracing him from behind, his legs bent at the knees over another mummified body part, this one even larger. He squealed and scrambled to his feet.
“Don’t move a muscle,” Jack said. Scattered all around them were more mummified remains. Arms, legs, torsos. But Jack could
only guess. Dag tapped him on the shoulder and pointed toward the recessed lights in the ceiling. Jack followed Dag’s upturned finger and that was when he saw the nets, hanging from the ceiling. And inside were more remains. One of the nets had weakened with age and spilled its contents onto the floor, spreading arms, legs, and other bits in every direction.
“What is all this?” Dag asked, staring down in horror at one of the limbs.
Jack felt his fingers rubbing together, trying hard to push through the gloved fabric separating them. “Looks to me like a close encounter of the third kind.”
Chapter 35
Armoni’s warning about Sentinel was still settling in.
“If these guys are so against first contact, why wouldn’t they go after SETI?” Mia asked, still trying to wrap her head around everything she’d heard.
“Where do you think SETI’s funding comes from?” Armoni asked, fishing a Soylent out of the fridge and popping off the lid. “Most of the big donors are either part of the group or somehow connected to it. It’s been going on for decades with nothing to show for it. They know it isn’t going to work. The whole thing’s a publicity stunt. But should an intelligent signal ever be detected, you better believe they’ll do everything they can to bury it.”
“Wouldn’t the scientists just go to the media?” Ollie asked.
“Yes, but who controls the media? Sentinel would simply compromise them. Plant drugs in their cars, accuse them of pedophilia, rape. Just ask Julian Assange. Their other tool is ridicule and, when that doesn’t work, straight-out misinformation. Flood the zone, as you Americans say, with contradictory information. Soon, no one knows what to believe.
“But it’s with their propaganda arm that things get really scary. These days, fewer and fewer people trust the news, but everyone likes movies. Count up the number of feature films where aliens are portrayed as the good guys and then count up the ones where they’re invaders, monsters and generally out to destroy us. Again, follow the money. That’s what I did and nine times out of ten, the project led back to someone connected with Sentinel. If I’d known before you showed up this had anything to do with them, I would never have let you in.”
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