Outside Context Problem: Book 01 - Outside Context Problem

by Christopher Nuttall

  “We don’t have the bodies in any of the public examination rooms,” Colonel Fields said, somewhat regretfully. “The NBC team that brought them here placed them in the storage room until we brought in a team of qualified experts. We’ll have to suit up and go into the sealed area.”

  Alex heard Santini groan, but he didn’t understand why until they stepped into a dressing room. It reminded him of a swimming pool changing area, except that it was clearly intended for both sexes…and there were more ominous notices on the wall, warning him to ensure that he had gone to the toilet before donning the protective outfit. Smaller notices warned him to report any cuts or damages to the outfit at once, reminding him that the sterile environment could be compromised quite easily. Alex remembered the Russian scientist who had accidentally infected himself with one of the nastier viruses and shivered. An accident could wipe out the entire team.

  He kept his back turned as he donned the suit, feeling odd as he pulled it over his suit. It felt as if he should be naked – it was already feeling uncomfortably hot – but Colonel Fields was pulling it over his own uniform. He checked his pockets, but apart from a single picture of his ex-girlfriend, there was nothing that could have torn a hole in the suit. The ominous warning signs insisted that he check twice, so he obeyed. There was no point in taking chances.

  “Let me check the suits,” Jane Hatchery said. Alex had barely heard from her before now – she hadn’t seemed very interested in the crashed ship once she had recovered from the culture shock – but now she was definitely taking an interest. Like the others, she was looking at her own personal holy grail – the chance to examine creatures that had been born on another world. NASA might have claimed to have found traces of life on Mars or in a meteor – and scientists had speculated for years that there was life under the ice on the gas giant moons – yet no one had seen a real alien, until now. Alex had seen footage that claimed to be from Roswell, but he’d dismissed it. It couldn’t have been real.

  The suit was growing more uncomfortable by the minute – it was far too hot already and he felt sweat trickling down his back – but he ignored the sensation as Colonel Fields opened the airlock, waving them into a darkened room illuminated by dim red light. The airlock swung closed behind them with an ominous thud, leaving them in the darkness. A moment later, there was a flash of brilliant light, a shower of liquid from high above, and then a hiss as air was pumped through the chamber.

  “Please be patient,” Fields said. His voice sounded odd through his own mask. “This is the sterilisation process. The light should have killed any germs on the suits.”

  Alex waited as patiently as he could, feeling the suit shifting around him as the process was slowly completed, until finally the second airlock door swung open. The room beyond looked just like a hospital operating room, apart from the dim red light beaming down from high above. Alex blinked as his eyes struggled to grow accustomed to it, wondering why they hadn’t used normal light. It was probably intended to help keep certain forms of life alive – bright light could kill some viruses – but it added an ominously unsettling air to the room. It reminded him of some of the odder alien abduction accounts. There were people who believed that the UFOs were operated by the government for carrying out secret medical experiments on American citizens.

  Fields stepped around an operating table, nodding towards where the bullet-proof glass separating the sealed compartments from where the observation compartments had to be – Alex couldn’t see out of the chamber in the gloom – and led them towards a second hatch set into the wall. He keyed a console on one side of the hatch and it hissed open, revealing a second darkened chamber beyond. There were a handful of small surgical beds, like Alex would find in a standard hospital and several machines with purposes that he could only guess at, but it wasn't them that held his attention. He found himself staring at the half-seen bodies lying on the beds before Fields waved them closer. The sense of unreality welled up again as he stepped forwards. The aliens were real.

  He couldn’t have sworn as to how he was so certain. The aliens were humanoid, yet he’d seen more alien humanoid aliens in countless science-fiction films. It was their very…lack of real strangeness that convinced him that they were real, a faint sense that he was looking at something out of this world. Memories surfaced within his mind. He’d been nine years old on a rocky beach playing in a pool when one of the rocks had moved. In the moments between seeing the rock move and realising that he was looking at a giant crab, he’d had the sense of something truly alien. It had brought out the arachnophobia in him. Somehow, he felt the same way about the aliens. They were convincing in a way that science-fiction aliens were not.

  “This is EBE1,” Fields said, slowly. The Colonel sounded awed, but he’d had a day to get used to the idea of aliens. Alex couldn’t have spoken for the world. The sense of something utterly alien was overpowering. “That’s Extraterrestrial Biological Entity. One of the NBC team gave them that designation.”

  “Smart,” Jane Hatchery said. She had managed to hang on to her professionalism; indeed, she sounded as if she couldn’t wait to whip out a scalpel and start dissecting the alien. “I’ll want those team members for the research program here.”

  Alex barely heard her. He was staring at EBE1.

  He’d expected little grey aliens. The Greys had been so predominate among alien encounters and abduction reports that it seemed inconceivable that there was not even the slightest connection with reality. The Greys had entered popular culture; there were religions devoted to them, entire groups of people claiming to have been abducted and anally probed by them…hell, insurance firms were even offering to insure people against being abducted by them! EBE1 was smaller than the average human, but it wasn't grey. Even in the dim red light, it was apparent that it had a light yellow skin tone. It was very far from human.

  It was thin, almost like a starving teenager, wearing a silvery one-piece suit that covered most of its body. Its head was massive, out of proportion to the rest of its body, with two very dark eyes and a tiny mouth. It seemed to lack both a nose and ears, or hair. He leaned closer, staring into sightless eyes, and shivered. The eyes were disturbing even in a dead alien. What would a live one look like in person? His eyes fell to the creature’s hands and he frowned. They were long and thin, perfect for manipulating even the most complex machinery, yet there was something disturbing about them too. He remembered ET and realised why he saw the alien as disturbing. It might have passed for a friendly alien in bad light…

  They could be the Greys, he thought, and shivered again. He knew far too well how unreliable hypnotic regression actually was. The victims of alien abductions might have accidentally misled the researchers, or drawn images from popular culture, or perhaps they’d seen the aliens onboard their ships, in bad light. They might have seen them as grey, rather than pale yellow – there was something strange about their skin tone as well – and reported them as such. If abductions were real, what else might be real too?

  He wanted to touch the alien, yet somehow he couldn’t bring himself to lay a finger on the dead body. It was almost like trying to touch a spider. He’d seen people who’d picked up live spiders and other unpleasant creatures, even allowed them to run around on their bodies, but Alex had never been able to do anything like that. There was something in his mind preventing him from touching the alien. It was just too different to be tolerated.

  “They were carrying a handful of odd tools and other devices,” Fields said, in response to a question from Jane. “We sterilised them and put them in one of the lower levels for later analysis. We haven’t attempted to undress them or anything beyond the damage already inflicted on their clothing by the crash. We decided we’d wait for the experts before proceeding. However…”

  He led them over to a second table. “This is EBE4,” he added. “As you can see, it appears to be a different species entirely.”

  Alex had heard that before, from Jones, and had tended to dis
count it. There had been dozens of different aliens reported by humans ever since the UFO craze had begun, but he suspected that most of them were hoaxes or misidentifications. How could the Earth be visited by blonde blue-eyed Nordic aliens, small savage beasts and high-minded angelic entities, to say nothing of the enigmatic Greys, all at the same time? There couldn’t be so many cultures so close to Earth, could there? SETI had never picked up an alien signal – or at least it had never picked up anything that could be proved to be an alien signal – and if there were so many races nearby, Alex tended to regard that as unbelievable. Conspiracy theorists had claimed that the Government was controlling SETI and using it to cover up alien transmissions, but Alex knew better. It was far more likely that there was only one race near Earth, if there were any at all.

  The second entity put the lie to that thought. It was massive, well over six feet tall, and even dead, it looked daunting. It was humanoid, but had massive muscular arms and legs, as well as a face that seemed to be half-bone. Merely looking at the alien’s face made him feel sick – it looked as if half the flesh had been melted off the face, revealing white bone – yet he was sure that was natural for the alien. It was injured – its legs looked badly damaged – but Alex had the odd impression that the alien wasn't suffering. He found himself wondering if it was really dead and nearly stepped backwards before he caught himself. It had to be dead.

  Its eyes were small and piggish, set within the bone. It had no hair – like the first alien – but there were hints of shell or bone on the back of its head. It reminded him of the crab he’d remembered earlier and the shell that protected its innards; the alien seemed to be covered in natural armour. Its hands were rough, large enough to crush his head in a single squeeze. He hadn’t seen anything like that outside a handful of very tough soldiers who’d spent years building their bodies up into peak condition. The alien had sharp fingernails and tattoos on the back of its hands. There was no way to know why it wore those. He looked back at the first alien and frowned. EBE1 had no fingernails at all.

  “My God,” Gayle said. She sounded terrified. “I wouldn’t want to meet that up a dark alley.”

  “There are nastier things wearing human forms up some dark places,” Santini said. He didn’t seem so daunted by the alien, but then, he was one of the toughest soldiers in the world. Alex wondered if he was already sizing the alien up as a potential enemy. It was hard to imagine EBE1 posing a threat, but far too easy to see EBE4 being armed and dangerous. it could have stepped out of an alien invasion movie. All it was lacking was a heavy energy weapon . “For all we know, the creature is a pacifist.”

  “A carnivore,” Jane said, dispassionately. “Unless it comes from a completely different evolutionary path to humanity, it evolved to rend and tear its meat, just like us. Humans have teeth evolved to eat meat and vegetables, but this alien has only fangs. I wonder what it eats normally.”

  “Us, perhaps,” Gayle said. She still sounded nervous. “Wasn't there a movie about alien cannibals invading the Earth?”

  Alex could have named five off the top of his head, but he had other concerns. “How many different types of alien were on the crashed ship?”

  “Two,” Jones answered. He’d taken one look at EBE4 and retreated to the corner. Alex didn’t envy him. He was the one who would have to brief the President. Somehow, he suspected that the alien would make a bigger impact on anyone who saw him in person. “There were three of the first type and two like…”

  He waved a hand at EBE4. “There were two like that one,” he said, catching himself. His voice sounded more than a little shaky. “That proves that two different alien races are probing the Earth.”

  “Maybe not,” Jane said. “For all we know, one of them is male and the other is female.”

  “They’re so different,” Santini pointed out. “How can they be from the same race?”

  It was Gayle who answered, her voice flat and dispassionate. “On average, men are generally stronger and faster than women,” she said. “When pregnant, women rapidly become less capable of looking after themselves, or defending themselves against attack. A woman goes through a rapid series of changes after she reaches maturity, but a man does not. Primitive societies tended to form communities that kept women protected as they would bear the next set of young, which they then justified with religion and other such outdated crap. The aliens may have something comparable to that in their biological heritage.”

  “Leave that for the moment,” Jones said. “Doctor Hatchery, how long would it take you to confirm that there is no biohazard?”

  “I’m not sure,” Jane admitted, finally. “I can run through the standard tests, which would at least allow us to be reasonably certain that there is no danger, but these are aliens and they may have unexpected surprises within their bodies.”

  “I can give you one right now,” Steve Taylor said. They all turned to look at him, his face hidden behind the mask. “What killed them?”

  “The crash, of course,” Fields said, puzzled. “The Base Security Team didn’t shoot them down as they emerged from their craft.”

  Alex saw what Taylor was driving at. “The bodies are too intact,” he said. “They crashed, but they should have been able to walk away from it. Instead, they all died.”

  “There have been cases of pilots crashing their aircraft and surviving,” Taylor agreed. “There have been…incidents where pilots have been killed in crashes without apparent damage, but mostly the damage is obvious. Why were the aliens killed if their craft survived surprisingly intact?”

  “I don’t know,” Jones admitted. He looked over at Jane. “Make finding out what killed them your second priority, but concentrate on the biohazard threat. It would be nice to know if we can avoid nuking this base to avoid a disease outbreak.”

  “Understood,” Jane said, shortly. She looked down at the body, already dissecting it in her mind’s eye. “I’ll start work as soon as the NBC team is brought into the complex.”

  “They’re on Level 4,” Fields said.

  “A thought,” Alex said. “Do we want to dissect the aliens?”

  Jones gave him a puzzled look. “How else do you intend to learn about them?”

  “If one of our pilots was dissected, we’d be furious,” Alex said. The American Public would go apeshit, although the response to beheaded hostages in Iraq and Afghanistan had been muted. “What happens if the aliens take offence at our decision to cut open their friends and peer inside their bodies?”

  “Point,” Jane agreed. “I’ll stick to non-intrusive techniques at first, and then reconsider once we reach the limits of what they can teach us.”

  “Don’t forget to stick a probe up its ass,” Santini added. Alex couldn’t help himself. He giggled, feeling the tension being slowly released. “We have not yet reached the limits of what rectal probing can teach us.”

  “Shut up,” Jane said, not unkindly.

  Chapter Six

  Colorado Springs, USA

  Day 6

  Robin Lance was in heaven, or at least what she considered heaven, although she did know that many of her fellow teens would have considered being shut up in a military base to be a foretaste of hell. It was true that some women in the US Military had had bad experiences, but it was also true that offenders were punished harshly and most female servicewomen had no better or worse experiences than their male counterparts. She might have been in lockdown – which was a fancy term for being kept in confinement until her superiors decided what to do with her – but she’d been granted access to all of the radar data collected by the massive network surrounding the United States – and charged with detecting any further alien intrusions. It was a task she took seriously. The UFO had somehow slipped right through the electronic fence and even Robin, who paid as little attention as possible to current affairs, found that ominous. She had a nasty suspicion that the only reason it had been detected was because its drive system had failed.

  Colorado Springs –
the famous NORAD – had been largely deactivated following the end of the Cold War, only to be reactivated from time to time to serve as a command and control facility for various American operations. The President might no longer fly to NORAD in case of a nuclear war – the massive complex was too well known and almost certainly on the list of targets for a mass offensive – but it still served an important role. It was also the ideal place to store a handful of personnel who’d seen too much and who also needed to work on the mountains of radar data collected and stored under the mountain. Robin had been impressed with the massive computers and had examined the records carefully. Every radar record the United States – and some of its allies – had made for the last fifteen years had been stored.

  One of the problems with UFO investigations – one of her briefing officers had told her – was that radar tapes had been routinely wiped, overwritten or destroyed. In the days before computers had become capable of storing so much data, there was simply too much information to be stored for long, not when the tapes were so expensive. The conspiracy theorists – he’d told her with a wink – had sweated blood over the thousands of tapes that had gone missing, unaware that they were routinely rewritten or destroyed. After 9/11, the USAF had started to store data for much longer periods, although even with modern computers, there was a massive backlog for researchers to sort through. Without modern computers, Robin knew, it would have been completely impossible.

  The problem was that radar tended to be an inexact science. It was quite easy to get an inaccurate reading if the radar beam passed through transient atmospheric conditions, or even flights of birds or weather balloons. The USAF joked about the kids who’d launched balloons into the air and triggered off a major security alert, but Robin no longer saw the funny side. A transient contact, one that appeared and then disappeared, might just be written off, rather than being investigated. The problem was that there were so many transient contacts on the records that, if all of them were assumed to be alien spacecraft, literally billions of UFOs had visited the Earth. Robin knew that the simplest explanation – that the contacts were actually random weather conditions or flights of birds – was far more likely, but she couldn’t rule out a single contact. Going through all of the contacts would take years.