by Andy Ritchie
‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘Surely it would be better to give you a heads up on what’s going to be talked about.’
Tukaal sighed a little.
‘You would think so,’ he replied, ‘But the Intergalactic Researchers Authority convinced the powers-that-be that to reveal the issue before the meeting could lead to the development of pre-conceived ideas in the mind of the Ambassador, which could lead to pre-judgement of the outcome of the Resolution Meeting. So the Protocol was amended to ensure that no information regarding the reason for postponement was to be discussed prior to the meeting.’
‘I guess they have a point,’ I remarked. ‘After all, you’re already half-convinced that this Researcher has only requested the postponement so he can flag up this melancholia thing.’
Tukaal’s eyes narrowed momentarily.
‘Point taken,’ he said, though his demeanour suggested the point had been taken with some reluctance.
We sat in silence for several long seconds. Then a thought occurred to me.
‘If he’s a researcher, then perhaps his research has resulted in him finding something which they don’t want anyone to see or know about.’
Tukaal made a couple of those strange facial expressions which people make when they are considering something vaguely unpalatable.
‘You could be right...’
I bristled with pride.
‘...but then again you could be wrong.’
I deflated like a popped balloon.
‘We could indulge in conjecture for several hours and still be no closer to the truth. The only way we can know for sure is to meet up with the Researcher and find out what he’s been up to.’
‘And when do you plan to do that?’ I asked.
‘Not today, unfortunately. He wants to meet tomorrow. He’s given me the details of where and when he wants to meet. The challenge is going to be to meet him without our new acquaintances gate-crashing the party.’
It’s at this point that I’d like to highlight the fact that something about Tukaal had changed. When we first met, he spoke very properly, minding his ps and qs and generally sounding like he had learned English at the David Niven School of Enunciation. But, since we had been at the supermarket, his accent had ever-so-subtly altered...and now he’d started to use terms like ‘gate-crash’, which seemed really out of character...I don’t know...it was almost as if he was trying to go a bit Cockney-like, a bit rough, giving it some of this and some of that...not over the top, like they do in Guy Ritchie films, just a little less plumy.
I could, of course, simply be imagining the whole thing!
I’d finished my tea, so I poured myself yet another cup. Tukaal smiled genially as he accepted my offer of a refill.
‘So what can we do for the rest of the day,’ I asked nervously, ‘now that we’ve got the Gestapo camped outside my front door and every satellite in the sky probably looking into my back garden?’
Tukaal didn’t answer. Instead, he simply stared into his tea, as if the swirling liquid could provide him with some answers.
I had just started eating my umpteenth Boaster when he said something bowel-looseningly terrifying.
‘I may well have placed you in extreme danger, Jeth.’
It was not really an apology. It was more a statement. It was cold and it was unemotional and I didn’t like it much.
And then he just lapsed into silence, continuing to stare at his tea, his face blank and expressionless.
That was the precise moment when I think he realised how badly he had fucked up my life.
That was the moment when he recognised that the situation had suddenly spiralled out of his control, but that it was not just him who was having to face the consequences.
The outwardly simple premise of getting a lift off a stranger because no-one will believe them if they start talking to the media about UFOs is fine in principle because the poor, unfortunate soul who is chosen has, themselves, a choice of whether or not they stay quiet about the whole thing.
But when that choice is taken away, when others get involved and that poor, unfortunate soul becomes an interesting blip on their radar, then what was simply an act of convenience for Tukaal suddenly becomes a stinking, life-changing pile of shit for whoever he picks on.
In this case, me.
I didn’t know what to say or what to do.
I certainly wasn’t going to grant him absolution by saying something like:
‘Oh, it’s okay, don’t worry about it. I’m sure when all this blows over and you’ve gone to meet the President, they’ll simply forget about me and I’ll go back to the life I had before you turned up and everything will be peachy.’
Why wouldn’t I say that?
Firstly, because I wouldn’t have been able to say it with any conviction because I didn’t believe it, and secondly, because absolution was something he simply didn’t deserve.
No, what he deserved at that moment was to stew in the juices of his own guilty conscience, to reflect long and hard on what he had done and to consider how the hell he was going to make things right.
And a long, cold silence provided him with ample opportunity to do just that. So I stayed silent and I stayed frosty.
Unfortunately, that same long, cold silence also gave me the opportunity to desperately wish that there was some way I could turn the clock back, back to Friday evening when, instead of driving up to Winter Hill with my camera, I choose instead to stay at home, to ring up San Remo’s and order a large pepperoni pizza and a side order of fries, and then settle down on the settee in front of the TV with a couple of beers and watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy into the wee, small hours.
I would have given anything to be able to make that different choice, to have stayed blissfully ignorant of Tukaal and the Confederation and the Researcher...and the dark forces which send men out in black Range Rovers to plant cameras and microphones and things in people houses and in their cars and on their clothes...and, more importantly, to have them stay ignorant of ME.
If I had made a different choice, I wouldn’t even exist to them, so inconsequential was my life. I would be nothing. Nobody. Zilch. Zero...and because of that I would be ignored...and because of that I would be safe.
But not now.
Now they knew where I lived, where I worked, what I ate for breakfast, how often I went for a piss, every element of my life, every thought, every dream, every fear.
But scariest of all, they also knew that I now know about them, that I had become aware of their existence...which left the awful, unanswered question of how they would react to my possessing that knowledge.
That’s when an imagination can simply run away with itself because, very, very quickly, you realise that they can do exactly what they want to. They could make me simply disappear. I guess they could make it so that I had never even existed in the first place.
They can do anything whilst I, well, I can do nothing.
I was a pimple that they could squeeze, a fly that they could swat, a candle flame that they could simply snuff out of existence (see, no problem with coming up with metaphors when I’m shit-scared!).
I felt incredibly small and insignificant...and it really is a most unpleasant sensation.
Eventually, I decided that if I was going to be shit-scared, I’d at least like an idea of whom it was I was being shit-scared of.
‘THEY know where I live, Tukaal. By now, they’ll know everything about me. They may choose to leave me alone when this is over, but we both know that that is pretty unlikely. So I think you need to start sharing your thoughts with me, don’t you? We could begin by you telling me who you think is following us and planting cameras and bugs all over my house.’
Over the next few hours, over several more pots of tea (not to mention a couple of slices of cheese on toast with HP sauce) and yet another packet of Chocolate Hobnobs, Tukaal (hopefully still stewing in his guilt) did indeed share with me his thoughts on who may be involved and why.
When he’d finished
, I think I was just numb with fear.
The men in the black Range Rover and the men who broke into my house to plant all those surveillance devices, they are not the ones to be worried about. They are just men, following orders, doing what they are told and probably not really thinking about it.
No, the ones to worry about are those who tell those men what to do.
According to Tukaal, the ones giving the orders could be:
- An ultra-secret branch of the intelligence services (though obviously not that secret!), codename Project Condign II, set up to specifically look at extra-terrestrial activity in the UK. But apparently it is small and not particularly well-funded, so Tukaal doubted whether they were behind the men in the black Range Rover.
- A foreign power with interest in the activities of extra-terrestrials, though these are again unlikely as they would have to have moved extremely quickly to get teams in place in the UK. Even so, such powers could be:
- the US (obviously) who apparently have a large division of the NSA devoted to just this kind of work
- the French, who have something called SEPRA (Rare Aerospace Phenomena Study Department)
- the Russians (can’t remember what Tukaal called their alien-hunters!)
- plus others.
- A more conventional branch of the UK government, possibly one of the traditional secret services. Although Tukaal had poo-poo’ed this idea earlier, commenting that it was unlikely that the UK secret services had the means to track URGs, he did admit that it was possible that the Researcher had it wrong and they weren’t tracking the communicators. Perhaps, as I had suggested, the Researcher had stumbled into something to do with national security and that was why they were looking for him...but, as Tukaal had previously responded, that didn’t explain how they knew about him...
- It could be one of the many national and international agencies involved in monitoring extra-terrestrial activities on Earth...yes, such organisations do exist and, apparently, have existed for decades (bet the conspiracy theorists and Roswell-believers will love this revelation!). Some of these agencies, particularly the ones like CSETI (the Centre (or ‘Center’ if you’re American and can’t spell) for the Study of Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) have two faces — the one that the public sees, all satellite dishes and geeky scientists, and the one that they don’t see, all rapid deployment teams intent on CE-5 Initiatives, whatever the hell they are!. Tukaal thinks that it may be possible that CSETI, or one of the other agencies, has found a way to track sub-space communications, in which case they could track the URGs...but it would be unusual for them to use the type of surveillance equipment we had found in the car and the house...
- It could be one of the ludicrously wealthy, space-obsessed multi-billionaires who reputedly spend small fortunes on teams which travel the globe looking for evidence of extra-terrestrials. They would certainly be able to afford a whole fleet of black Range Rovers and Tukaal agreed that their involvement was a possibility.
- It could be other aliens, ‘Privateers’ Tukaal called them. They operate outside the Confederation, looking for planets and life-forms that they can exploit. They plunder under-developed worlds for all they can, stripping them of resources, sometimes enslaving entire populations (sort of what the rest of the world has tended to do with Africa!). These Privateers, according to Tukaal, would certainly have the means of both monitoring spacecraft movement around the Earth and may also have the ability to track URGs, and they would definitely have an interest in trying to scupper any chances of the Earth becoming part of the Confederation because, if that happened, they would almost certainly be driven off the planet. He pointed out that, in one of the Reports to the Classification Council [Collator’s Note: Report to the 849th Meeting of the Classification Council, which I have included in Confederation Note 2 in Appendix A.] there is clear evidence of ‘corrupting influences’ at work on the Earth, which could be Privateers. He claimed not to know any more than that because his area of expertise was not Planetary Classification but Life-Form Classification. Not sure I quite believe him — after all, he seems to know a hell of a lot about all these other potential candidates!
- Finally, and most bizarrely, Tukaal suggested that they could be the Confederation itself. Apparently, such is the bureaucracy of the Confederation, it is not unknown for some departments to be completely unaware of activities even as significant as a First Contact. It was possible, Tukaal thought, that another part of the Confederation (possibly the Trade and Prosperity Council, or the Well-Being Council) were already conducting preliminary work on Earth but were unaware of the impending First Contact. They would most certainly be able to track both the movement of Confederation spacecraft and also the use of URGs, and it could be that they were simply trying to find out what another Confederation team was doing on this planet. Personally, I thought this was nonsense — after all, if they’re all aliens, why don’t they get together and have a meeting about it or something - but then, when you saw the First Contact Protocol and all the things which need to be done in preparation for a first contact, it was not inconceivable that someone has not told something really important to someone else and that, because of such an oversight, this whole thing was a misunderstanding between two Confederation departments!
Of course, like a good politician, Tukaal said at the end of his musings that he could not guarantee that those giving the orders to the people who were following us were any of those he had mentioned. It could, he admitted, be another party entirely, here for entirely different reasons.
This last comment from him was not particularly helpful.
So, it seems to boil down to a choice between hard-up alien-chasers from Blighty, marginally better funded alien-chasers from Johnny Foreigner, spooks from MI5 or MI6 or MI-pick-a-number, a large clandestine international agency of alien-chasers, some mega-rich oligarch with a private army and a space fixation, a bunch of asset-stripping intergalactic entrepreneurs, or another department of the Confederation pissed-off about the fact they didn’t get the memo!
It was a bizarre mix of suspects, some more plausible than others (though that measure of plausibility does need to be placed into some kind of context; after all, we are talking here about aliens from outer space and shit like that. We are not talking about candidates for the next parliamentary by-election).
So why, as I took the dirty tea cups and plates into the kitchen to do the washing-up, did I feel deep down in my waters that we weren’t dealing with any of these?
And why, as I write up these notes, do I have the same, unshakeable feeling that there is someone, or something, else?
It may stem from the nagging doubt I have about whether Tukaal was, and is, being totally honest with me...but that doubt itself may simply be paranoia born out of fear.
One thing was, and is, for sure.
I am still no clearer to knowing who it is who ordered the bugging of my house and my car, who it is who told the black Range Rover to follow us, who it is who has apparently been trying to catch the Researcher, or who it is who could, in the next few hours, crash through my front door and take me away to some dark, painful place from which no-one ever returns.
And it was, and in a way, still is, the inability to put a name or a face to my tormentor which troubles me as much as anything.
Maybe that is why, once the pots and cutlery had been washed and another cup of tea was brewing, I insisted that we gave our brains (or whatever it was Tukaal had) a rest and watch something that might just put a smile on our faces.
I’m not quite sure what Tukaal made of Pixar’s ‘UP’...and to be honest, I don’t really care. It made me feel better...at least for a little while.
Alas, once the final credits had rolled and the TV had been switched off, grim thoughts re-gathered like dark clouds in my mind and my mood dropped once more.
I found myself pondering again the nameless and faceless nature of those who gave the orders to the men in the black Range Rover...and I became determ
ined that they should have a name.
At first, I thought of names like ‘bogeyman’, ‘nemesis’, ‘watchers’...but all those names evoked specific, pre-determined images in my mind...no, what I needed was something...empty. It had to be a name with no baggage, no pre-conceived ideas of what it meant, what it represented. It had to be a completely blank canvas, but one which, nonetheless, carried with it an air of acute menace that is associated with being kept in the dark, being left in ignorance about the size, nature and intent of a dark force which is gathering around you.
That’s why I have decided to call them...
THEM.
You see, by definition, THEY are without identify, an intangible entity that cannot be seen and cannot be touched and cannot be reasoned with.
THEY are nowhere and THEY are everywhere.
THEY are all-seeing and all-knowing.
THEY are single-minded in their purpose and merciless in the execution of that purpose.
I’ve even come up with a definition of THEM.
It’s an odd thing to do, I know, but I felt it was something I had to do, if only to kill these last couple of hours before I finally become too tired to think and hopefully too tired to dream.
I’ve tried to make it a dark and sinister definition because I think it needs to leave me under no illusions of what I am dealing with, help me be prepared for the worst case scenario, force me to be realistic about the potential consequences of what it is I now find myself so deeply involved with.
THEY aren’t playing.
THEY are serious.
That’s why I need a serious definition of THEM.
(Not that it’ll do me much good in the long term.)
THEM (δεm) n. a faceless, menacing and intangible organisation of people who will ruthlessly exercise their power for their own ends, without prejudice and regardless of the cost to others.
*
I guess it’s not a jolly caper anymore.
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Diary Entry 5
Monday 13th September