Outside Context Problem: Book 01 - Outside Context Problem

by Christopher Nuttall

  He sat down on the bed – it was hard and lumpy, barely used – and felt himself starting to shake. The alien craft had made a huge impact on his mind. He wanted desperately to deny that it was real, yet he couldn’t lie to himself. The alien craft was real, which meant that the aliens were real, which meant that the world had changed overnight. He had always imagined that if he ever encountered real aliens, he would have faced them with calm dignity befitting a representative from his planet, but instead he wanted to curl up on the bed and push the world away. The cultural shock had almost brought him to his knees. What would it do to the remaining population of Planet Earth?

  It was galling to admit it, but Jones had been right. There would be panic in the streets if the alien presence became public, yet it wouldn’t be long before it did become public. Jones might have been committed to enforcing the President’s decree of no disclosure – keeping the entire project under wraps and completely black – but Alex suspected that the final decision didn’t rest with him, or even the President himself. There was a second factor here – the aliens themselves – and they might decide to take it public at any moment. How could the President stop them from contacting Earth and demanding the return of their craft?

  Alex had been barely out of preschool when an F-117 had been shot down over Kosovo. The United States had rescued the pilot and demanded the return of the stealth aircraft, but not before the Russians had taken a careful look at the craft’s technology. The aliens might demand that the United States return their craft or else…and, with their technology, the ‘or else’ was likely to be formidable. Alex had read a hundred different versions of the aliens invading Earth and knew how effective control of the high orbitals could be. A single asteroid could push the entire human race on the road to extermination. They could pick their targets and bombard the planet at will. If they demanded surrender, there might be no choice but to run up the white flag and bend over for them. The Earth’s ability to wage war in space was very limited. They’d have to hope that the aliens took one look and died laughing.

  He checked the cabinets and found nothing, not even a candy bar left behind by the previous occupant, if there had been a previous occupant. It was easy to believe that his room had never been touched until the base had suddenly found itself hosting a crashed alien spacecraft. It had that musty air that seemed to hang in most of the base. Area 52 – or whatever it had originally been designated – had been asleep for too long. Alex pulled himself to his feet, checked the set of base plans on the tiny desk, and headed out of his room towards the common room. There might be some coffee there.

  The common room looked more like a ready room for pilots on a more average USAF base, although it lacked any pin-ups from later than 1970. Alex had never heard of some of the women whose images were hanging from the wall, but he had to smile at how demur they were, compared to the outright pornography of his own era. There was a large coffeepot in one corner, a set of comfortable chairs, and a modern-looking television mounted on the wall. He wandered over to the coffeepot and checked it, before pouring himself a cup. It was hot and very black, shocking him back to himself. The daze that had fallen over him since he had seen the crashed ship faded away.

  He picked up the remote control and flicked on the television, wondering what might be showing. He flicked through a set of movies – he hadn’t liked them much when he’d seen them the first time – and a pair of pornographic movies from one of the pornographic satellite channels. He was tempted to watch, but flicked instead to CNN, where a newsman was talking about the death of a well-known pop star. Alex watched without much interest. An old girlfriend of his had loved the star to the point where she sometimes pretended that she was sleeping with him, but Alex had rapidly learned to loathe him. The death of the pop star – a result of drug abuse – left him cold.

  “…Gathered outside the graveyard to bid their idol goodbye,” the newsman said. Alex remembered joking with his friends about how they could tell when a newsman was lying – when their lips moved. “The death of Eddie has been a tragedy for music lovers across the nation, who have joined together to wish Eddie a safe passage to the worlds beyond…”

  “Most of the musicians play some kind of music,” Alex muttered, taking another sip of coffee. He clicked the channel and moved over to Fox News. “And now…?”

  “Senator Harrington today said that he felt that the President’s reform campaign had gone too far and that he would oppose further reforms wherever necessary,” the newswoman said. Unlike the CNN newsman, she was remarkably sexy, with long blond hair and open shirt. “Harrington refers, of course, to the controversial reform program for schools across America proposed by President Chalk. The White House has refused to comment.”

  Alex rolled his eyes as the news rolled on. There were more riots in Gaza, an energy crisis in Europe, more protests and demonstrations in the United States, threats of new taxes or reforms to older tax laws, economic disruptions caused by a recent default on the part of a Third World borrower, the campaign to select a new Secretary-General for the UN had bogged down…it was all so normal. It was all so…typical. Even the humorous report at the end – about a rabbit that had somehow managed to injure a man with a switchblade – was standard. The world had changed and no one had even noticed!

  “This coffee is foul,” Jones said, from behind him. Alex refused to give him the satisfaction of jumping. “Do you mind if I make a new pot?”

  “Suit yourself,” Alex said, glancing down at his watch before remembering that he’d left his watch behind in Washington. The clock on the wall suggested that he had been staring at the television for over thirty minutes. “Look at the news!”

  Jones frowned. “There shouldn’t be anything about the…ah, crashed ship in it,” he said, shortly. “What’s happening in the world today that compares to what we’re doing here?”

  “Nothing,” Alex said. He changed the channel again and found a baseball game underway. “The entire world has changed and no one has even noticed!”

  “That’s not a bad thing,” Jones said. He finished cleaning the pot and poured more water and coffee into the machine. “The longer we have to come to grips with what we’re dealing with, the easier it will be to convince the public that we know what we’re doing.”

  “We don’t know what we’re doing,” Alex said, after a little while. “What happens when the aliens declare themselves in public?”

  “We’ll deal with that when it happens,” Jones said. He poured himself a cup of coffee, added a surprising amount of milk, and leaned over to pick up the sugar. “What do you think will happen when Joe and Jane Public hear about the alien craft?”

  He answered his own question. “Panic, Alex,” he said. “They will panic. You saw how we reacted to the craft and we had time to brace ourselves. The public…will remember all those moments from science-fiction – the White House getting blown to bits, the massive robot shutting down the world, tripods slicing their way through a Victorian army, giant centaurs marching through Washington – and will go completely mad. We need time to prepare.”

  Alex shook his head. “I don’t think we’ll have time to prepare,” he said, glumly. “We should get the panic over with now.”

  “The President disagrees,” Jones said, mildly. “And, seeing that he’s the President, what he says goes.” He took another sip of his coffee and smiled in appreciation. “Would you want to tell the public that aliens have been flying through our atmosphere for years – perhaps decades – and the only reason we even found out about it was when one of the craft suffered an accident and crashed, right in front of the most sensitive spot in the entire country?”

  He shrugged. “We need to give them some hope of a solution before we take it public,” he said. “The fact that we are completely naked before them will not go down well with the public, let alone the rest of the world.”

  Alex looked down into the dregs at the bottom of his cup. “I take your point,” he said, unwill
ingly. “As long as we’re preparing for trouble…”

  “Oh, we’re preparing,” Jones assured him. “I don’t know how much good it will do, but we’re preparing.”

  Alex changed the subject. “I’ve been looking at UFO reports ever since the Foreign Technology Division anointed me Spooky and charged me with collecting and analysing them,” he said. “If even a tiny handful of those reports were real alien spacecraft, the aliens have been here for decades – and, if some of the abduction reports are to be believed, have been committing acts of war against us.”

  He remembered, bitterly, the frustration when he couldn’t solve a mystery – and the delight when he could. The vast majority of UFO cases were easy to crack and his clearance, allowing him access to classified files, made it easier to locate UFO reports that were caused by classified USAF aircraft. The civilian researchers might follow up their own line of enquiry, yet lacking that access meant that they lacked Alex’s insight. The vast majority of their ‘unidentified’ reports had been identified. Alex had come to believe that if he had been allowed to share his findings with civilian groups, the vast majority of UFO cases could be cleared. It was, like so many other things, Not Allowed. The military preferred to have UFO researchers looking at the skies rather than into secret military hangars.

  “Acts of war,” Jones repeated. “Do you believe the reports?”

  Alex hesitated. “The early reports – people like George Adamski – were mainly nonsense,” he said. “Their reports of what there was in space – they claimed cities on the Moon or Venus – were disproved by our own space program, although it is possible that the aliens lied to them. They rarely stood up well to serious researchers and most of them have been forgotten now. The later brood – the abducted humans – claimed that they’d been taken by the aliens and used for medical research. There were plenty of similarities between the different reports and…well, most of the victims went through a great deal of trauma…”

  He shook his head. “But hypnosis is unreliable,” he continued. “Anyone who studied the issue – like me, or even an avid watcher of The X-Files – would know enough to construct a scenario that would seem convincing, without having any actual basis in reality. It’s quite possible that the abduction experiences are the mind’s attempt to cover up childhood sexual abuse or worse and sorting out the real cases from the downright absurd is impossible. I haven’t had much direct experience, but I do keep tabs on what the civilians are doing and they’re getting nowhere.”

  Jones frowned. “No direct proof?”

  “No,” Alex said. “A UFO researcher in England suggested – quite seriously – using Special Forces to watch the houses of known victims to see what happened, if anything. Researchers have placed cameras in their houses, but they always record the victims turning them off before an abduction, or they simply fail.” He snorted. “There was even a weird case of an abduction that was supposed to have been witnessed by the then-Secretary-General of the United Nations.”

  “And it never became public?” Jones asked. “No one ever followed up on it?”

  “Hundreds of researchers tried to follow up on it,” Alex confirmed. “They got nowhere.”

  He poured himself another cup of coffee. “Neil wants to get some other technical personnel involved,” he said. “I want to make enquiries with my correspondents, see if there are any UFOs being reported over Colorado – or here, for that matter. I’m supposed to get copies of all UFO reports made to the USAF – that’s hundreds every month – and an increase might show us if the aliens are hunting for their lost craft.”

  “Smart,” Jones said. “We can have the reports forwarded to you here.”

  Alex barely heard him. “We get a handful of odd reports every year,” he said. “Some radar locks that show, briefly, a solid object. Sightings made by pilots and other trained personnel. We even scrambled fighters more than once to challenge objects that vanished before we could catch them. I could account for some of them being stealth aircraft or experimental designs, but not all of them. How long have the aliens been here?”

  Jones considered it. “When did the UFO craze start?”

  Alex laughed. “There were reports of flying airships – the Great Airship Scare – in the late 1890s,” he said. “There were bizarre reports from the First and Second World Wars. During the Cold War, we had reports of Ghost Rockets over Scandinavia – those were later explained as being Russian experimental missiles – and the first people claiming to have been contacted by aliens. And then we had the abductions and increasingly complex reports of crop circles, cattle mutilation and UFOs that killed or injured people…”

  “Point taken,” Jones said. “They might have been watching us for years.”

  “It doesn’t help that for every serious UFO researcher, there are at least ten kooks and crazy bastards who think that we’re covering up UFOs from Roswell and hundreds of other UFO crash sites,” Alex continued. “Every now and then, someone out to make a quick buck will produce a book or documentary claiming to expose government secrets regarding UFOs. The Day After Roswell was a pack of lies from start to finish, claiming that the Earth has been at war with aliens since before Roswell…and that all of the vital advances made in science came from technology recovered after that so-called UFO crashed. My more…public counterparts are deluged with crazies convinced that we have dead aliens on ice somewhere and…”

  Jones laughed. “Do we have dead aliens in the Pentagon?”

  “Not as far as I know,” Alex said. “I looked into Roswell when I took the job – no one tried to prevent me from studying the crash – and discovered that it was nothing more than a high-altitude aerial balloon. It doesn’t stop people trying to make money from UFOs – Roswell has a UFO festival every year – and it doesn’t convince the nuts that we’re not covering up anything, apart from our own secret projects. Hell, sir, some of my superiors prefer people thinking about UFOs. It keeps them from wondering just what wonders we might have hidden away at Groom Lake and other places.”

  “Area 51,” Jones confirmed. “Do we have dead aliens there?”

  Alex opened his mouth to rebut the suggestion, and then realised that he was being teased. He’d been to Groom Lake AFB several times in his career, but he hadn’t been allowed into some of the more secret parts of the complex, even with his clearance. The President himself wouldn’t be allowed access, unless there was some compelling reason to allow him entrance, and everyone who worked permanently at the base ended up being watched for the rest of their lives. If there were dead aliens there, no one had shown him…

  And there was little point in a cover-up. The reports of a UFO crash at Roswell faltered on that alone. Why would anyone keep it secret for over seventy years? The alien threat wouldn’t have gone away, or been forgotten about in that time. It would have altered the course of history itself.

  “No,” he said, finally. He stood up and switched off the television. “Shall we go see the aliens?”

  Jones nodded. “Neil has decided to remain with the craft and plan out how it is going to be dissected,” he said. “The others are trying to snatch some rest before coming face-to-face with real aliens. Seeing the craft for the first time…”

  “Culture shock,” Alex said. He frowned as something occurred to him. “You know, back when Cortez was invading Mexico, there were people who claimed that the Mexicans couldn’t actually see his ships. They were so far beyond their life experience that they couldn’t grasp their existence. Aliens are part of our culture, but what if…?”

  “We’d recognise an alien mothership if we saw it,” Jones said. His voice was doubtful. “Wouldn’t we?”

  “I wish I knew,” Alex said. “For all we know, the aliens are hanging right over our heads, or are based on the moon…which might be a colossal alien spacecraft itself. Neil Armstrong was supposed to have seen UFOs on the moon…”

  “I think you get paid too much,” Jones said. He put down his coffee cup with a thump. �
��Come on. Let’s go wake up the others.”

  Chapter Five

  Area 52, Nevada, USA

  Day 3

  It was a more subdued group that assembled on Level 2, facing an intimidating sign that warned of BIOLOGICAL HAZARD and detailed, in extraordinary terms, the level of precautions that even casual visitors needed to take. It was a heavy door, capable of standing off an antitank missile – or so Colonel Fields claimed – and its mere presence underlined the dangers of biological warfare. Alex had read accounts of how the Russians had accidentally released dozens of different viruses into the local area while developing their biological warfare program. It still rankled with him – and hundreds of other Western analysts – that despite promising otherwise, the Russians had continued their biological warfare program, a program that might well be capable of exterminating the human race. It was no wonder that intelligence agencies spent sleepless nights worrying about terrorists gaining access to Russian biological weapons. Fanatics willing to die wouldn’t hesitate to unleash a plague that even Stalin would have balked at deploying.

  Alex had never been in a biological lab before, but the outline was familiar enough. There was an external-internal area for casual visitors, where they could observe the procedures without having to don heavy biological protection suits and other precautions, and an internal area that was sealed up tighter than a spaceship in orbit. There were no frills inside the viewing compartments, no coffeepots or other signs of human life. It was as cold and sterile as the grave. Ominous notices on the wall warned of other possible dangers and promised dire retribution to anyone who attempted to pass through the airlocks without permission. Alex took heed. He’d seen enough movies about biological warfare to know that none of the warnings were exaggerated.