by Janet Shore
“The professor is a no show. Class is officially called off according to the fifteen minute rule.”
Matt left the class with the other students and exited the building. He walked over to the student center to look on their computer at the possible student internships that he might be eligible for when the semester ended.
On his first search, the computer list returned had interesting positions at various hospitals, banks, software companies, oil and gas distribution, and libraries. Matt mindlessly paged down the list, page after page. Suddenly, Matt saw the Exoplanet Institute listed. His excitement grew as he saw that the Institute had a dozen positions that they wanted to fill. He quickly downloaded the application to his memory stick. Then, he headed back to the dorm. Matt spent the rest of the afternoon, carefully filling out his application, attaching as much supporting material as possible, including a few recommendations from professors from various projects that he assisted them with. The sun was setting when he decided to email, fax, and overnight separate copies of his application. Matt figured that one of those methods might get through, even if any of the others failed.
That night, Charlie and Matt ate together in the dorm cafeteria. Both the amount of people and the menu selections were oddly sparse. Charlie pondered,
“It is really odd that your physics professor didn’t show up for the morning class at the same time as my professor.”
Matt joked,
“Maybe it was the alien abduction.”
Charlie retorted,
“Don’t laugh. All of the news outlets are calling what happened last night, The Great Abduction.”
Matt laughed,
“That should sell some commercials.”
Charlie urged,
“They are serious. The government has no explanation other than that the investigation is ongoing. It involves the intelligence agencies across the world.”
Matt replied,
“A cop told me today they thought it might be terrorist kidnappings.”
Charlie exclaimed,
“That’s ridiculous.”
In Washington D.C., the clouds were puffed white against a cold blue sky. The halls of the white house had greater than usual activity. Scores of staff and officials filled the halls coming to grips with the strategic importance and risk of this global mystery. Pedro Sanchez passed through security, walked down the hallway, and entered his office. He was surprised to see a familiar face sitting at his desk,
“Derek Taylor! How are you?”
Derek Taylor got up and vigorously shook Pedro’s hand,
“I’m fine. I want to show you something.”
Derek Taylor, the same man that Charlie and Matt had seen briefly interviewed on television the night before, pointed at a small cardboard box on Pedro’s desk. Pedro asked,
“What is it?”
Derek explained,
“With all of the alleged alien activity in the news, we are supposed to assess the strategic risk aspect of the current phenomenon.”
Pedro interjected,
“Do you mean all of the missing persons?”
Derek shrugged his shoulders,
“That is a part of it. It is probably not the whole story. There is really no explanation for that much abduction all at once, when they have been spotty at best in the past. At any rate, I requested an ancient alien artifact from the National Archives. It is in that cardboard box on your desk.”
Pedro’s eyes opened wide,
“I thought there was a policy in place that prevented that material from leaving the federal storage facility.”
Derek answered,
“This situation comes under the emergency clause of that policy. I was briefed on your upcoming role at the pentagon. This artifact should be helpful.”
Pedro walked over to his desk and opened the cardboard box. Strangely, there was no official labeling on the box. How could the National Archives keep track of this box without some kind of labeling? Inside the box, something was wrapped in cloth. Very carefully, Pedro peeled back the cloth to reveal a metallic device. Derek further explained,
“It was recovered decades ago. You can clearly see the distinctive markings on the side.”
Pedro replaced the cloth, closed the box, and put it in his briefcase,
“Thank you, Derek. I think further analysis of this device may indeed be helpful. Is there any documentation from the Archives that I need to sign for a chain of custody?”
Derek replied,
“No, there is not anything needed in these circumstances.”
Pedro thought that exceedingly strange, possibly improper, but his trust in Derek allowed him to set aside his reservations. Derek picked up his satchel,
“Well, Pedro, good luck. Let me know if you need anything.”
Pedro escorted Derek out of the office, sat down at his desk, and dove into his busy schedule. Derek quickly slipped into the bathroom across the hall. He found an empty stall, reached into his satchel, and pulled out a round mirror, and a sealed plastic package. He hung the mirror by its stand on the coat hook on the inside of the bathroom door. Carefully, he ripped the tabbed seal off of the plastic package, pulling out an almost alive rectangular piece of a spongy material. Using the mirror as a guide, he placed the strange square on his face. Immediately, the square formed to his face. The alien plaque gently morphed his features into a new identity. With his disguise in place, Derek left the bathroom and easily walked through security without having his actual facial features recorded on the security cameras. Once outside the white house, Derek walked in the direction of the Lincoln Memorial. Discreetly, he bent over and peeled off his facial disguise. He took a lighter and set it ablaze. Dropping the flaming object on the grass, a passerby quickly ran over and doused the object with water. Derek excitedly shouted,
“I caught my lunch on fire with my cigarette lighter! Thank goodness you came along when you did!”
The passerby, a portly man, said,
“It doesn’t look quite like lunch now. It looks like a charred mess of ash. What kind of sandwich was that? By the way, my name is Sam.”
Derek politely shook his hand,
“I am pleased to meet you and thank you again, Sam. My name is Derek. It was supposed to be a corned beef sandwich.”
Sam leaned down and picked up the remains of Derek’s disguise,
“It doesn’t smell like burnt corned beef. It has a sweeter smell.”
Derek grabbed it from him and smelled it,
“You are right, it does smell curiously sweet.”
Derek then quickly tossed it in a curb side garbage basket,
“Thanks again, Sam.”
Derek continued on his way toward the Lincoln Memorial without looking back. Sam walked over to the garbage can and peered inside with a puzzled look on his face. Having emptied his water bottle on the fire, he tossed the empty water bottle into the garbage can and went over to the roadside food vendor to purchase another liter of water.
Derek walked the stairs up and entered the Lincoln Memorial. He turned left between the four pillars and approached the Gettysburg address etched in stone. There were two other tourists beside him reading the unforgettable words. Suddenly, Derek heard a strange sound coming from his satchel. He very quickly exited the Lincoln Memorial and walked as far away as he could from isolated pockets of tourists. The sound stopped as suddenly as it began.
At the white house, the president’s chief of staff burst into Pedro Sanchez’s office and handed him a special document,
“Pedro, this document comes from the president directing the scope of duties and powers that you and your team at the Pentagon will have. These are strange times, my friend.”
Pedro took the document, leafing through it quickly, and then placing it in the briefcase with the cardboard box that Derek Taylor gave him. The chief of staff noticed the box, but did not comment about it. Pedro thought that was strange since he expected that the president’s chief of staff would be well
aware of his possession of an alien artifact from the National Archives. He began to ask about it, when the chief of staff got a cell phone call of some urgency. He waved at Pedro, turned, and hurriedly raced out of his office and down the hall.
Not far from the Lincoln Memorial, Derek Taylor reached into his satchel and pulled out a device that was remarkably similar to the one he had given to Pedro Sanchez. Derek looked around. There were no tourists or police within one hundred yards of his location. The device glowed blue and said,
“Is the package delivered?”
Derek replied, “Yes. The package is delivered.”
Chapter II
Matt’s mission control fantasy had come true. The last week had blurred in his mind as if it were ten years ago. In the dorm of the college, the routine of classes, and then while emptying a spam folder, he found an important piece of non-spam which landed an internship at the Exoplanet Institute. On the first day of the new job, Matt sat down at the assigned console desk in the third row from the big screen and opened the playbook, a notebook of considerable size detailing the project parameters. The mission statement for the group was titled, “Monitor the audio and video feed from Mars rover #836.” There were over a thousand rovers on Mars moving like ant colonies since the discovery.
Sitting at an adjacent console, Matt’s support technician, Mary, was responsible for monitoring the health of #836. Mary was attractive, but happily married with children. Family pictures dotted her console space. He leaned over and asked,
“Where did they find it, Mary?”
“I don’t know. Wherever the #782 team had been surveying last week. My guess is that it is not an alien artifact, but just some old space junk from a third world or private survey. Those strange markings on it do not really match up with anything on Earth, but you know how the viewers on social media find just about everything from any shadow of any rock we happen to look at.”
An announcement came over the loudspeaker,
“The three o’clock briefing on UO-65 by Dr. Charles Jenner of the 782 team will be held in the EM conference room.”
The two arrived about fifteen minutes early, but still had trouble finding a seat. The place was packed. The stuffy air held a palpable anticipation. Dr. Jenner walked onto the stage about five minutes past the hour to loud enthusiastic applause and whistles. The large screen behind him showed a photo of Morrow crater with map lines that showed the flight path of rover #782. He began,
“This afternoon my aim is to brief you on what we think UO-65 isn’t, and to speculate on what it might be based on what we know so far. On January 11th, at 14:27 ST, #782 took flight with the goal of flying over the rim of Morrow crater for a standard survey. The result was anything but standard. At about 16:00, we cleared the rim and twenty minutes later made a routine landing at about a one mile depth to calibrate our sensors. At that time of day, we were still in sunlight, though about twenty percent of the floor of the crater was in shadow.
The sensor scan showed an anomalous fragmented metal object 100 meters from the touchdown site. After completing calibration, we moved the rover into position for a visual close-up of the object.”
Dr. Jenner paced across the stage pressing the slide control several times, finally getting the big screen to slide number two.
“As you can see, UO-65 was once an intact metal sphere that is in three large pieces and over twenty smaller pieces. On the next slide, you can see a zoom perspective of the inside content of the sphere. It is a mixture of metal and organic material. The elementary composition is on the following spectrograph showing significant amounts of carbon, silicon, and hydrogen. The material is undergoing further analysis. At this point, it is pure speculation as to exactly what the structure and function of the material is. Obviously, Earth media has already hyped this as a significantly different kind of alien contact. We cannot definitely approach that question until we get more results and a working hypothesis of what the content of the sphere is. There appears to be too much material for it to be a recent contamination from one of our missions. The relation of the material to the next slide also remains unclear.”
He quickly clicked past the spectrograph slide. The next slide displayed created a lot of whispered buzzing side conversations in the audience.
“This view of the largest metal piece contains a definite engraving from a symbolic language with spaced lettering that matches nothing on Earth from either current or past known languages.”
The rest of the briefing went over technical details of the sphere’s touchdown tracks in the crater, as well as possible dating scenarios. For some inexplicable reason, carbon dating techniques failed to give consistent results on repeated trials. Dr. Jenner speculated that micro-meteorites rather than impact were responsible for the sphere’s primary breakup. He concluded the seminar with a stirring comment,
“There are eleven hundred and seventy rovers currently being monitored by all of you. We are looking for additional spheres or other oddly shaped artifacts. It is quite possible that this sphere is all that there is. More probably, one of you will find something soon. This search is quite unprecedented. When you do, if you do, I have every confidence that our training and experience will show the world our level of professionalism under extraordinary pressure. There will be a media onslaught. Though we shield you as best we can from it, inevitably someone from Earth will get data before we have had a chance to fully investigate the evidence. I know that makes our jobs that much harder, and our eventual explanations that much more difficult to understand. No matter how forthcoming with well supported facts, some on Earth will cry cover up. However, it cannot distract us to the point that we see ghosts where there are only shadows. Thank you, now I’ll take a few questions.”
The room broke out in a thunderous applause. A line of people started to form in the aisle behind a microphone stand. Each one would have their turn to ask a question. Matt felt a sudden excitement that forced him out of his chair and into the line. As the first several questions were asked, he ran his question over and over again in his mind, wording it in different ways, answering it for himself, and then reconstructing his question again and again. The reality was that Matt would soon be at the mike in front of a packed house. That fact made him nervous as he stepped forward a bit each time a questioner left the microphone.
His turn to speak arrived. He stammered, “Was the sphere in flight before impact under its own power or was it ejected from another body?” Immediately he felt as though he had asked a stupid question. Matt felt lightheaded as he stood there listening to the response.
“So far, there is nothing in the tracks such as burn traces that would explicitly indicate a power source within the sphere. That does not rule out that it ejected its transport energy in some other way before it touched down. Of course, there is the possibility that it fell out or was deliberately tossed out of another object either in flight at low altitude or perhaps in orbit.”
Matt shakily returned to his seat with a sense of relief that the public ordeal had ended. Mary turned and smiled reassuringly. When the lecture was over, they returned to their workstations. Mary went down the checklist.
“Matt, except for the known wiring problem in the back left motor, everything is green.”
Matt asked, “What is the operational impact of that?”
She scratched her head with a tablet stencil, “So far, there is no impact. If it were to fail, I would expect that we would start drifting toward the right during flight. Ground motion will be unaffected.”
Matt turned back to his screen, visually scouring the area. Hours passed. Soon the shift would end and he could get something to eat. As his mind wandered through various possible menus, he was startled by a flash across his screen.
“What was that?” he exclaimed and reached for the rewind control. Mary jumped out of her chair to see what they had found.
“I’ll replay it ten times slower so that we can see it.”
Shocked looks ca
me over their faces as an intact sphere flew across the screen from right to left. Matt pressed the supervisor forward button so that the recording could be further reviewed. His job now was to steer the rover to find that sphere. The sphere had a couple of minute head start but #836 automatically picked up the motion and was in pursuit. Matt increased the zoom on the video to the point that the object looked somewhat fuzzy. Suddenly, the sphere stopped and turned to face the approaching rover. Matt slowed the rover to a dead stop at fifty yards from the sphere. By now, a crowd had gathered around his terminal. The supervisor signaled that he was going to take the 836 video feed to the big screen.
The sphere started to pulsate. Matt heard a softly varying vibration coming from the object. He quickly flipped a switch to patch the audio into the room’s loudspeakers. The silent big screen image of the object came alive with sound.
“There appears to be some pattern to the variations in the sound.”
Chuck, Matt’s supervisor, asked him to run an adaptive analysis at his console. The analysis consisted of a series of computer simulations scaling the sound in frequency and volume in a search for patterns. Matt’s excited face turned to stone as he reviewed the result.
Chuck had come down to Matt’s terminal and rolled up a chair. He looked at his face,
“What’s the matter?”
Matt was speechless. He removed his headset and handed it to Chuck. The supervisor heard the computer’s result, dropped his clipboard and reached for some switches on Matt’s console. Matt had to move his chair to the left as the supervisor reached for his keyboard. Clicking ensued. Matt looked up at the big screen having been crowded out. The sphere was modulating with more amplitude, looking like a squashed ball in one direction and then another. At times, it moved quickly between directions with varying frequency and amplitude. The sounds produced on the main speaker became odd and irritating. Matt reached across the console and cut off the sound to the room as Chuck continued intently to get the computer analysis of the sounds onto the properly secured cloud storage.