Cornelia glanced toward Jerry sitting on the far side of the conference table. The producer could barely contain his glee, despite the fact that he, too, as per his own directions, tried to act as if cameras were not in the same room. Over the last two days, it began to look like the national security question was about to emerge as the newest angle in the globe phenomenon. Rick, in fact, had made a passing mention of it after Knight’s coup of a debate on the Peter Rollins Show. Once the show had been interrupted by incoming news of all those new globes, Pike seemed to unravel. His hoax explanation could withstand three globes, but with so many of those things turning up in so many places, seemingly overnight and without anyone seeing or hearing anything, the magician had run out of skeptical straws to grasp for. But then the next logical question was whether or not any government officials anywhere in the world might eventually speculate about a truly unexplained phenomenon that respected no borders or boundaries. “Imagine if one of these things appears inside a military installation,” Rick had wondered.
The globes even overwhelmed the biggest security story of the past week. Cornelia, of course, appreciated the irony of it all. She had been trying to follow the story on her iPad and phone whenever she got a free moment, all the while taking the ribbing of her Confirmation costars. When they had arrived in Mount Shasta City, news broke of an oil tanker’s hijacking by an Al-Qaeda-affiliated Indonesian terrorist cell. The hijackers had planned on turning the ship into one immense bomb, sailing it into the Port of San Diego, and blowing it up. Incredibly, the plan was thwarted by one crew member who managed to elude the terrorists and feed information to the Navy’s SEAL Team Six. The ship had eventually been taken by the SEALs and the hijackers killed well before the vessel could be a threat to San Diego. Headlines blared “Die Hard on the High Seas” for days afterward.
Then the day after Knight’s appearance on the Rollins show, during the president’s press conference about increased seaport security-measures in the wake of the hijacking, the globes pushed everything off the agenda again. The word spread that getting someone from the military or intelligence circles to talk about the globes would be a major news coup. No one had yet managed to do it, but Cornelia thought she had a good shot at it via Sarah Robinson. They had known each other since high school, and now Sarah’s father, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Garret Robinson, was stationed at Travis Air Force Base outside of San Francisco. The globe mystery, coupled with the installation’s connection to the foiled San Diego attack, was now attracting the attention of some conspiracy theorists.
“Now we just need to convince his bosses, right?” Cornelia said. Out of the corner of her eye, she thought she saw Jerry drumming his fingers on the armrest of his chair in what looked almost like childlike exuberance.
“I think we can eventually do that,” Sarah replied.
Cornelia almost wanted to breathe a loud sigh of relief. “I’ve seen military personnel talk to cheesy investigative shows before…unlike our show, of course.”
Sarah chuckled from the other end of the line. “I trust you totally. And yeah, they’ve spoken before to like a million documentaries about UFOs and Roswell and all that stuff…but you know how it is now. The whole system’s on edge. Hardly a day goes by without another one of those things turning up.”
“And the speculation will keep getting wilder and wilder. I’m sure your dad knows that.”
Sarah didn’t respond immediately. “Cornelia,” she said at length, then paused once more. A nervous beat later she added, “Do you know anything? Have you guys talked to anyone who has…you know, any clue about what’s going on?”
Cornelia was taken by the tension in her voice. “One professor’s or expert’s guess is as good as the next.”
“Oh, God….”
“Nobody knows. Aliens? Angels? Demons? Earth spirits? A hoax? The CIA? The end of the world? Take your pick, Dr. Robinson. Someone who graduated at the top of Stanford med school’s bound get as close to the truth as a bunch of tin-foil-hatted conspiracy geeks chaining themselves to the gates of Travis and Coronado.”
The latest globe appearance had unleashed chaos on the Internet. The object appeared on Silver Strand beach in San Diego, barely a hundred feet from the waters of San Diego Bay. With the globe in the middle of the sand, no one could see any possible tracks that could have been left by transport equipment. For many, however, the San Diego area had been of even greater importance since it was the site of the thwarted terrorist attack. It was also in the vicinity of the state’s biggest concentration of military installations.
From a navy training center to the Marine Corps Recruit Depot and the Coronado Naval Amphibious Base where four SEAL Teams are headquartered, the area is a virtual naval stronghold. The amphibious base had deployed the SEALs for the assault on the hijacked oil tanker. But despite this concentration of state of the art military preparedness-hardware and the navy’s most elite fighters, yet another globe appeared seemingly out of thin air. For many conspiracy theorists, the military connection was impossible to ignore. Speculation had spread that the globes were the result of government experimentation on everything from camouflage techniques to mind control. Moreover, shortly after the raid on the oil tanker, one of the SEAL intelligence officers involved with the mission had been reassigned from Coronado to the Navy’s Fleet Reconnaissance Squadron next to Travis Air Force Base. Now roving groups of conspiracy theorists had taken to camping out near Travis, the navy reconnaissance complex, as well as the navy and marine corps installations in San Diego.
“Oh, come on,” Sarah said with an embarrassed chuckle, “I wasn’t at the top of—”
“You were close enough.”
“You guys don’t need to inflate me like this in your final cut of the show. So go ahead and edit all this stuff.”
Cornelia knew that Sarah’s modesty wasn’t false at all. Her friend had always been exceedingly down to earth, no matter how good she was at what she did and how far her career as a cardiac surgeon had rocketed her. But now Cornelia wondered about a feeling of discomfort somewhere deep in her core. There was a palpable sense of dread spreading among all the people she spoke to and interviewed about the globes. That dread was spreading through the world now. Yet for her a stronger feeling was…a promise of opportunity. She wouldn’t lie to herself about it. She looked at the globes as a career opportunity, and even more so as she spoke to her childhood friend. Her phenomenally successful childhood friend. Cornelia wanted to use these globes badly. She wanted to use them to salvage her career, to get back what others had unfairly taken away from her during that accursed “Blogging Avenger” scandal in Florida.
And Cornelia also couldn’t deny the bitter satisfaction she got out of thinking about how her career could thrive as a result of the globes, while that of Stewie Corcoran remained in its local-level—“hyper local” as they call it in the news business—stagnation. Stewart Corcoran—no one called him Stewie to his face—was the producer who had thrown Cornelia to the wolves five years ago, during the “Blogging Avenger” incident at Tampa’s All Saints’ College. While Stewie might have ultimately been trying to worm his way out of a firing when the Avenger case blew up into a P.R. disaster for the station, Cornelia suspected that he was also trying to get revenge for her rebuff of his drunken advance at a Christmas party.
In the Blogging Avenger case, Cornelia’s TV station, WRND, had been pointed in the direction of someone who sounded like a faculty member of All Saints’ College, blogging anonymously and accusing several high-ranking school administrators of some financial slight of hand. With WRND uncomfortable with reporting on the anonymous accusations, Cornelia’s intern, Roger Pryce, took the initiative to hack the blog and reveal an All Saints’ professor as the Avenger. At that point, one bad decision led to a worse one, with Stewie Corcoran, over Cornelia’s vehement objections, airing the story. After the outed professor’s firing and heat within the news industry coming down on WRND wh
ile the state attorney’s office considered filing criminal charges for the hacking, Stewie managed to convince his bosses that not only was Cornelia the only one at the station who knew about Pryce’s hacking, but she was the one who encouraged him to do it. The ax instantly fell on her.
The best Cornelia could do after her firing was announcing the weather under the nickname of “The Stormy Chick” on a Laguna Niguel, California, classic-rock radio station. That was until a year ago, however, when she was invited to a party thrown by a coworker’s brother-in-law in Los Angeles. The brother-in-law produced commercials for ad agencies, and he knew Jerry Peretti from their days of producing music videos.
But even as her professional life took a turn for the better, some malicious force of destiny just had to balance it with a turn for the worse in her private life. Her real-estate agent boyfriend, Barry, despite having worked the topics of engagement and marriage into as many conversations as he could, suddenly turned frigid at the thought of the resurrection of her TV career. When she had told him that she accepted Jerry’s offer to be a Confirmation cast member—and explained that her work on the show should not be a major issue for their relationship since L.A. is so close to Laguna Niguel—Barry threw a tantrum in the middle of their dinner at the Seaside Vista Grill and stormed out, accusing her of wanting to prove her superiority by “fighting tooth and nail” for a better paying career than his.
Cornelia shook off these memories of fate making a plaything of her life, and her gaze darted toward Rick. He, too, sat at the conference table, his handsome features set in stony concentration, his eyes intently staring at the phone while he sipped a tall cup of coffee. Rick was perfectly happy to use Confirmation to turn his own life around.
“This is frightening, Cornelia,” Sarah’s voice snapped her out of her momentary reverie. “Isn’t it? You don’t think they’re right about a massive hoax, do you?”
“No. I mean, I don’t think it’s a hoax,” Cornelia said, and her thoughts jumped to what Knight had been saying about the angry skeptics since their interview with the Rutgers geologist. “Probably a lot of people talking about hoaxes don’t believe it’s one either. Maybe it makes them feel better to ignore the obvious.”
“I don’t know what’s more disturbing then.”
“Yeah…I guess we have no choice but to go along for the ride.”
There was a heavy beat of silence in the room, Sarah taking a few protracted moments to respond. “I’m going to talk to Dad. He’ll trust you. And I’m pretty sure he’s tired of hearing all the local conspiracy loons talking about the air force’s time-fractal displacement experiments. He’ll probably love to set the record straight…that neither he nor anyone he’s working with have a clue as to what’s going on.”
Cornelia felt like she had been taken off guard by something truly bizarre. “Wait a minute. A time fractal what?”
Sarah let out a hearty laugh. Cornelia thought there was a nervous edge to it. Her friend sounded like she was really blowing off some tension.
“I have no idea,” Sarah said. “It’s something I read on a harebrained website. They probably got it off an episode of Star Trek. But how about you guys head on up to San Francisco as soon as you can? I’ll meet you and hopefully we can set up one hell of an interview. I think Dad’s superiors will appreciate a chance to respond to some of this conspiracy craziness that’s been going on around here.”
When Cornelia saw Jerry pumping a fist, then give her a thumbs up, she said goodbye to Sarah with “Will do, sweetie. And thanks a lot.”
But just after she turned off the phone, Cornelia noticed that Jerry was no longer the person making wild hand gestures in the room. Now it was Ian’s turn. He was waving one hand around, trying to get everyone’s attention. His other hand clutched his iPad, something on the tablet riveting his attention.
“You guys’ve gotta see this!”
2.
“Someone beat the crap out of the Astounding Pike,” Ian yelled before anyone could ask what he was talking about. “From what it says, it looks like they went nuts and really messed him up.”
“Because of something he said about the globes?” Jerry blurted out.
“It looks like it. Check it out!”
Cornelia was the first one to look over Ian’s shoulder. The story of the Pike assault had a video link embedded. When Ian clicked the link, they saw a ghastly close-up of the magician’s battered face. Not only was most of Pike’s face obscured by the bandage covering his broken nose, but his left eye was still swollen shut and his right one overtaken by a purple/black bruise. There were blood-encrusted abrasions lining the tip of his chin and the left side of his jaw.
Cornelia felt embarrassed to think that there was a grotesquely comic touch to the way Pike’s usually jaunty handlebar moustache now drooped walrus-like around the two sides of his mouth.
“What kind of a world do we live in when this can happen to you for the words you speak?” Pike mumbled as the video stream started.
There must have been some bad fracturing to his jaw or teeth, Cornelia guessed. Perhaps wires inside the magician’s mouth had to remedy whatever damage had been done.
“Maybe it wouldn’t have happened if he wasn’t such a douche all the time,” Ian said in a weird matter-of-fact tone. “It says the whole thing started after he called a guy in Florida a con man,” he muttered, skimming over the article and pointing out the highlights to the Confirmation team.
In fact, Cornelia discovered as she read the piece, Pike had been getting ever more aggressive in his insistence on a world-wide hoax as the number of globe discoveries increased. One of the recent American globes turned up on the property of a man in Homestead, Florida. That man, George LaPlante, a former construction worker who had been unemployed for over a year with a debilitating back injury, was enterprising enough to charge visitors to take pictures with his globe and start printing and selling globe-souvenir T-shirts.
After the Miami Herald profiled LaPlante in a lengthy article, Pike responded in a blog post, denouncing the “crass, cash-grabbing con men and charlatans who are the key to the true nature of this global circus.” When Miami’s NBC affiliate invited both LaPlante and Pike for a debate about the issue, blows were almost traded on the air. Almost, but not yet. Pike insisted on calling LaPlante a part of a massive, money-making swindle. LaPlante, who was less facile with the alliterative phrases, merely called Pike a moron who enjoyed being blind to the facts, and an asshole (bleeped out during the broadcast) in need of a good ass-whooping. The ass-whooping itself only came when a congregation of the Atlantis-seeking Church of the Universal Dawn followed Pike to his hotel and started chanting “blind fool” at the tops of their lungs outside his room. The magician at that point should have been wise enough to wait for hotel security to come and take care of the problem. He, however, was not. Instead he confronted the group, suggesting they look for a good group-rate on psychiatric treatment. In a quickly ensuing melee, Pike, aside from head injuries, sustained one broken rib, a broken collar bone, and a broken wrist.
Knight cast a cool glance toward Ian. “Wow. Like you said, man. If he wasn’t such an obnoxious ass and—”
Cornelia couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “What? Are you saying he deserved this?”
“No,” Knight replied in very calm, unruffled tones. “I was about to say that if he wasn’t so arrogant, he could have waited in his room quietly and let security take care of those Universal Dawn idiots. But when you’re the Astounding Pike, I guess you have to be a tough guy even when you’re surrounded by psychotics like this.”
The old professor said the right things, Cornelia had to admit, but she still didn’t like the distant, nonchalant callousness on his face. For a moment, she could see a shade of the stone-cold teenage hoodlum from Newark in him.
Then, with a harder inflection, Knight added, “Pike might have been an asshole, but
he didn’t deserve getting beaten up for it.”
“Well, folks,” Jerry’s voice cut a swath through the tension between Cornelia and Knight.
When Cornelia glanced at him and saw him smiling, she found his look just as unpleasant as Knight’s.
“How about we move on to the next challenge, shall we? Let’s see what kind of psychotics are protesting outside these military bases near Frisco,” he said with ghoulishly chipper tones.
Cornelia couldn’t help but detest Jerry’s change of topics more and more with each word out of his mouth.
3.
The globe’s path of destruction down Powell Street had started with a car crash. A crash somewhat like Ballantine’s collision with the globe at Mount Shasta, Cornelia mused.
She wondered if her own thoughts had now come to resemble those of the conspiracy theorists and UFO buffs they had come to the Bay area to interview. She was making every kind of haphazard, convoluted connection between events and places as they popped into her mind:
The first globe was discovered in California.
A car crash started the chain of tragic events on San Francisco’s Powell Street.
The discovery of the first globe was a major turning point for the world.
What kind of a turning point would this become?
The noise certainly didn’t help her think straight. There were the sounds of the crowds all around; the onlookers trying to get as close to Powell street as they could, the police trying to contain them, the press on the ground as well as the news helicopters hovering overhead.
“This incredible chain of events started near the top of this hill we’re looking at,” Rick narrated as Tony’s and Matt’s cameras covered him. “From most accounts we’ve heard so far, it was the intersection of Powell and California Streets.”
She should probably have been in front of the camera and doing the talking herself for this segment, Cornelia knew. But when Ballantine had offered to take over the segment, she didn’t argue. Yes, a part of herself hated that she gave in, but she needed a moment right now to step back from what had happened here. Neither Ballantine nor any of the other team members were affected the way she was.
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