“Okay, I’ve seen enough,” Kiera said as she closed the tablet’s web browser. Opening her text app, she clicked on the message from Sarah and typed, “K. Looked at the link as promised.”
To Kiera’s dismay, Sarah replied within seconds. “So…what do u think? Can u help AJ?”
“AJ needs help all right, but not from me!” Kiera typed back. She included an emoticon of a tongue-drooping, cross-eyed smiley face.
“Yeah…I know. He’s wacky, but he’s really sweet,” Sarah answered. There was a pause and then Sarah followed up with another text. “And he’s really bummed out. Won’t you please meet with him?”
“I’m an aerospace engineer, not a shrink,” Kiera responded.
“I know, but you’re the best AE I know!” came Sarah’s swift reply. Attached to the text were several wide-smile emoticons.
“Um…I’m the only AE you know.”
“PLEEEAAASSEEE!!! I’m on my knees begging.”
Kiera sighed and rattled off her response. “Look, I get one week off a month. I’m not devoting a second of it to meet with a crude, misogynistic nutjob…no offense.”
For several minutes, there was no response from Sarah. Kiera hated to be so blunt about it, but there was no way she was going to waste her time listening to 3lr0y’s wacked-out theory about aliens on Callisto broadcasting radio greetings to Earth. The dude was an accountant, not a scientist. And he had zero experience analyzing radio signals. He was just an amateur astronomer with a homemade radio telescope in his backyard who’d watched a few too many Star Trek reruns as a child.
Kiera lowered the tablet to her lap and reached for her iced tea. In midgulp, she felt a buzz from the device. Sarah had written back. With another sigh, this one deeper, Kiera pressed her thumb on the lock screen button to view the text.
“Didn’t want to do this…but u leave me no choice. Meet with AJ or suffer the consequences,” read Sarah’s message. A second text followed close behind, accompanied by a winking smiley face. “I still have the video, u know…the FULL, UNCENSORED version.”
“You wouldn’t dare!” Kiera responded.
“Watch me, twinkle toes.”
Friends shouldn’t let friends record karaoke performances, Kiera thought. Ever. Especially when alcohol is involved. Doubly so when the staggering, off-key rendition includes a raunchy striptease and pole dancing. While Kiera doubted Sarah was serious about posting the video, she knew her old roommate would continue to pester her until she got what she wanted. The threatened revenge porn was just Sarah’s way of short-circuiting the pestering process.
“Fine. 30 minutes, no more,” Kiera replied.
“Yay! He’ll be in Cocoa day after tomorrow,” came Sarah’s immediate reply. “I gave him ur # yesterday. He’ll contact u to arrange time & place.”
“You did what?!!!”
“Kisses,” said Sarah’s final text.
Kiera searched her emoticon menu for the one depicting a middle-finger salute. She fired off a reply filled with two rows of the icon. Unsatisfied, Kiera blurted a stream of expletives loud enough to catch the attention of a woman and child walking along the surf a hundred yards in the distance. The sour-faced woman glared up at Kiera’s fourth-floor balcony and shook her head. Red-faced, Kiera waved and shouted out an apology. When the woman was out of view, Kiera said, “Great way to start the vacay.”
Later in the evening, with her takeout dinner of egg rolls and Szechuan chicken consumed, Kiera sat in the corner of her living room sofa with a half-empty glass of Chardonnay. On her lap rested her tablet, and once again she found herself gazing at Ajay Joshi’s podcast channel. Whether driven by curiosity or sadism, Kiera had resolved to view his videos before she called it a night, and now it was time to make her first selection.
There were a dozen videos available on the home page and an archive link to thirty others. As Kiera scanned the lyrical captions of the twelve main clips, it was apparent that most were devoted to Ajay’s obsession with his supposed discovery of alien radio signals and his frustration with NASA and other “suck hole non-believers” who ignored his “pruf.”
Among these clips, his featured video appeared to be the most recent, so she opted to start there and work backward in time. Before pressing play, Kiera whisked down the remainder of her wine and set the glass aside.
The video began with a dark screen and the sound of ocean waves. After several seconds, the waves soundtrack faded and a voice said, “Greetings, playas…It is, I, Elroy, come to drop mo’ fo-one-one on yo sorry asses.”
The dark screen began to lighten, revealing a blur of changing shapes and colors. As the camera’s focus adjusted, Ajay appeared. Seated before the webcam, arms crossed like a posing hip-hop star, he had a scowl on his face and the burger-joint crown on his head.
Kiera winced, wondering if Ajay realized how comical his tough-guy presentation came across. The dark-skinned Nepali was string-bean thin, with biceps that looked like broomsticks poking out from the drooping sleeves of his Elroy T-shirt. Hardly the stuff of gangstas, she thought.
The laughable quality of the video was further bolstered by Ajay’s speech pattern. His attempt to mesh contemporary American urban slang with the high-toned inflections common among East Indian cultures only exacerbated the goofiness of his delivery…all this before he dropped a morsel of “fo-one-one.”
He held up a piece of paper and shook it at the camera. “Another diss from the naysayers!”
A subtitle appeared on the screen to clarify for his audience the identity of the antagonists who’d disrespected Ajay. The subtitle read, “Down wit NASAyerz.”
“Good lord,” Kiera said. “This might call for another glass of wine.”
The early part of Ajay’s rant focused on a letter he’d received from a NASA “scrub” on the day the video was shot. The bottom-feeding lackey, as Ajay also labeled him, had dared to challenge Ajay’s interpretation of intermittent clicks on a recording of radio waves from Jupiter.
This injustice, Ajay explained, was the latest evidence of a massive cover-up to hide the presence of aliens on Jupiter’s outermost moon, Callisto. Several groups within NASA had rejected his theory. Ajay reminded his viewers that scrubs from the European Space Agency, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, the China National Space Administration and the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, hadn’t even bothered to respond to his emails.
While he railed against their collective ignorance, Kiera noticed Ajay’s language and demeanor begin to change. The angrier he became, the more forceful his delivery. There was authority in his voice. Aided by the discard of his crown, Ajay morphed from slapstick foil to impassioned crusader.
“They say the clicks come from Earthbound interference. Skywaves, they call them. Ionosondes,” he said, using his fingers to form air-quotes around the two technical terms. “Well, I say, ionosondes, my ass!”
His expression was stern as he rattled off his rebuttal. “The sounds are clicks. They are not chirps. They are not lightning-induced static. They were recorded over a year-and-a-half period, by different Radio JOVE contributors in six different states, and the clicks occur only when Callisto passes in front of Io and Jupiter. The clicks make the same exact sounds in the same exact pattern, in exactly three-minute intervals, on all six recordings.
“Are we to believe that skywaves are capable of bouncing off the ionosphere with such precision, and that they inherently know to invade Io-B recordings when Callisto transits Jupiter?
“Some of the scrubs claim the clicks are electrical interference from appliances, or shortwave radio pranksters tapping out Morse code. Really? Are we to believe that the exact same type of appliance resides near the six different radio telescopes that have picked up the clicks? Hmmm? And that these appliances are turned on and off at precisely the same interval, producing identical click patterns? Or that a devious prankster travels around the country, perfectly guessing which Radio JOVE contributors will be recording Io-B storms on nights when Call
isto, Io, Jupiter and Earth all line up, and only on those nights? This devious prankster is apparently so clever, he is able to then set up his ham radio near the contributors’ telescopes and insert Morse-like, repeating signals?”
Kiera paused the recording as Ajay rose from his chair to emphasize his next point. She stood herself and headed for the kitchen. “Yep, more wine is definitely in order.”
As she poured the Chardonnay, she considered Ajay’s points. Although he was oversimplifying the explanations provided by his space agency villains, she had to admit his rebuttals contained rational challenges. Whether they were accurate or not was another matter, but at least he appeared to have counterarguments that weren’t based on comic book gibberish.
On her way back to the living room sofa, she made a mental note to learn more about Radio JOVE before meeting Ajay. She’d heard of the NASA program before and knew it was created to investigate magnetic storms on Jupiter, but that was the extent of her knowledge.
Seated before the tablet again, Kiera unpaused the video. Ajay, now in full meltdown, walked about the room, shouting, “No! I say no! And no, again! The signals come from Callisto, not Earth. They are being purposely broadcast by an intelligent life-form. They are not ionosondes, on Earth, Io, Callisto or Jupiter! It is an alien greeting. Or a distress call. I don’t know which, but I do know this: I will not be silenced!”
Out of breath, Ajay slumped back in his chair and glared at the camera. He planted the crown back on top of his thick, black hair with defiance chiseled on his face. As his respiration settled down, he flashed a gang sign and said, “’Til next time, peace out, bros and bitches!”
Fade to black.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kevin Patrick Donoghue is the author of the mystery thriller series The Anlon Cully Chronicles and the science-fiction thriller series The Rorschach Explorer Missions. He lives in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., with his wife and two sons. His books include:
Shadows of the Stone Benders, book 1 of The Anlon Cully Chronicles
Race for the Flash Stone, book 2 of The Anlon Cully Chronicles
Curse of the Painted Lady, book 3 of The Anlon Cully Chronicles
UMO, a short-story prequel to Skywave, the first book of The Rorschach Explorer Missions
Skywave, book 1 of The Rorschach Explorer Missions (release in the fall of 2018)
Ways to stay in touch with the author:
Click here to follow on Facebook
Click here to visit the author's website
Click here to join K. Patrick Donoghue's email subscriber list
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A special mention of thanks to my editor, Katherine Pickett of POP Editorial Services, LLC, cover designer, Asha Hossain of Asha Hossain Design, LLC, and copyeditors Cheryl Hollenbeck and Lisa Weinberg, for their collective help in the creation of UMO.
COPYRIGHT
This book is a work of fiction. All the characters, incidents and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual locations, events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
UMO
Copyright © 2018 Kevin Patrick Donoghue
All rights reserved.
eISBN: 978-0-9997614-4-1
Published by Leaping Leopard Enterprises, LLC
www.leapingleopard.com
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
First edition: August 2018
Cover art and design by K. Patrick Donoghue & Asha Hossain Design, LLC
CONTENTS
A NOTE TO READERS
PROLOGUE
1: BLACK OPS
2: MARS APPROACH
3: SEPARATION FAILURE
4: CROSSED WIRES
5: FIRST CONTACT
6: BLACKOUT
7: BARKS AND BITES
8: TAKE THE HILL
9: BAITING THE BEAST
10: FOR THE GREATER GOOD
11: ABANDONED
EPILOGUE
BONUS CONTENT: SKYWAVE PROLOGUE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
COPYRIGHT
UMO: A Chilling Tale of First Contact Page 8