Trinity's Legacy

by P A Vasey

  “May we join you?” came a low voice just behind my shoulder.

  I nodded, saying nothing, playing it cool. The white-haired man took the seat opposite and regarded me through lidded eyes. He gave a crinkly smile. “You’ve probably figured out we’re from the FBI,” he said, deadpan.

  I raised my eyebrows, duh.

  “My name’s William Hubert, I’m the Director of the FBI Science and Technology Branch, Operational Division.”

  The alcohol was starting to kick in, and I felt a little buzz of confidence. However, the adrenaline rush of the last couple of days had left me mentally exhausted.

  “Nice title, I’m impressed.” I said in a tone that suggested anything but. “Bet it’s hard to fit all that on a nameplate.”

  Hubert cracked another lopsided grin and looked sideways as the others joined us on the sofas and pulled up chairs. A dark-haired woman with flawless ebony skin gave me a slight smile and opened up a large laptop on the desk between us. Hubert nodded at her. “This is Colleen Stillman, she’s my second-in-command. Practically runs the department.”

  Stillman looked up briefly, smiled again, and resumed booting up her computer. Hubert pointed to the other two, a man and a woman, who had sat down opposite.

  “These folks, they’re both from NASA, here in an advisory capacity.”

  I took another slug from my glass, crunching ice, and pointedly looked out of the window. “NASA rocket scientists? All for little old me.”

  There was a commotion at the dining room entrance, and another man entered, flashing his badge aggressively at the goons on the door. He was wearing ripped jeans and Nike hi-tops and a T-shirt featuring Darth Vader sporting funky white sunglasses. This was in complete contrast to the rest of his appearance, which was of a portly middle-aged scientist with a hairline receding rapidly toward a patch of sparse sandy growth at the back. He was wearing round-rimmed glasses, which he took off and started cleaning on his T-shirt as he headed our way.

  Hubert leaned over and winked at me. “The Star Wars fan here is Dr Michael Holland from FBI Operational Technology. He works for me.”

  Holland sat down next to Hubert and gave me a quick smile. I settled back into the couch, crossing my legs. I was feeling a weird mixture of anger and apprehension, but I guessed that I maybe had more to gain from this than they did.

  Hubert reached into his jacket pocket and produced a brown envelope, which he placed unopened onto the table. I looked at it, arched an eyebrow, but didn’t move to pick it up.

  “Dr Morgan,” he said, the humour now missing from his eyes, “We’re here to talk about Adam Benedict of course. But first I need to fill you in on some background details. Colleen, are we connected yet?”

  Stillman glanced up and nodded. “Yes sir, I have the pilots now. On screen are Major James Powers and Captain Lyle Hunter.”

  She slid the laptop into a position on the end of the table so everyone could see the screen. I could make out two uniformed USAF personnel sitting behind a whiteboard that was covered in hand-drawn graphics and maps.

  Without looking up Hubert said, “Gentlemen, welcome and thanks for waiting.” He looked at me, pointing at the screen. “On the left is Major Powers who’s the commanding officer of Reaper Squadron, based out of Creech. Next to him is Captain Hunter who I believe has just come off a twelve hour shift flying a Predator drone over Afghanistan, which may explain the bags under his eyes.”

  The airmen nodded wordlessly. Hubert sat back in his chair, giving off the air of a man bored with proceedings. “Two days ago Captain Hunter photographed something unusual. Captain, would you care to elaborate?”

  Hunter cleared his throat and glanced sideways at his superior officer who nodded wordlessly. “Yes sir. At 0825 hours on October 21 I was test-piloting a prototype drone over the Nevada desert. This drone developed some technical difficulties requiring me to return it to base.” He turned and pointed at one of the maps behind him, which was overlaid by red lines and co-ordinates. “At 0845 hours my IR detector registered a magnitude five flare from the ground directly perpendicular to my aircraft, which was at that time at an altitude of forty-five thousand feet. The camera was automatically engaged and took a series of photographs which I’ve downloaded and sent to you as requested.”

  Stillman clicked a few keys on the laptop and the airmen were reduced to a secondary window as the screen changed to photographs of a grey desert pockmarked by depressions and craters resembling the dimples on a golf ball.

  Hubert looked back at me. “These were taken 36.79 degrees north, 115.9 degrees west, co-ordinates in the Nevada desert. More specifically, these co-ordinates are for Area 5 in the Nevada National Security Site, otherwise and previously known as the ‘Nevada Test Site’.”

  “I know what that is,” I said. The Nevada Test Site area began thirty kilometres or so west of Indian Springs. I took another sip of my rum. “It’s where the atomic bomb testing was carried out during the Cold War.”

  Stillman scrolled through more images, stopping at one that displayed a monochrome desert floor pockmarked by multiple craters and indentations. A single-track road could just be made out in the bottom right corner and there was a white vehicle parked next to a rock formation at the start of the incline to the crater.

  “This is the first digital image of the sequence,” said Hubert. “The crater at this location measures about forty-five yards in diameter. Colleen, run the sequence please.”

  Stillman brought up a checkerboard of about twenty images, each time-stamped and showing the same crater at half-second intervals. From the sixth photo onwards there appeared an expanding luminescence which started just off-centre and by the end of the sequence had enveloped the whole aperture of the crater.

  “Major Powers, would you like to comment?” said Hubert.

  Powers spoke up from off-screen. “Yes sir, we analysed these data from the drone camera, which has a thermo graphic, infra-red and multi-spectral targeting system. The maximum luminosity was recorded as twenty thousand lux. There was no radiation spike, no thermal signature, and apart from background static no noise was picked up.”

  I gave Hubert a withering look. “It’s a while since I did physics. Can somebody translate into English?”

  The guy with the Star-Wars t-shirt leaned forward, scratched his nose, and looked at me intently. Despite his appearance, his eyes were fiercely intelligent.

  “Twenty thousand lux is difficult to look at,” he said with a twitch of his lip. “At midday the sun is producing around one hundred thousand lux.”

  “A bomb, then?” I suggested with a shrug.

  He shook his head and smiled patiently. “Can’t be a bomb because there’s no heat or noise.”

  I looked at the laptop screen again. The sequence scrolled onward, the luminescence fading and collapsing until there was no sign of it and the crater looked exactly the same as at the start.

  Hubert coughed. “Major, Captain, thank you for joining us. That’ll be all for now.”

  Stillman cut the feed and the window went blank. Hubert looked at me and tilted his head, saying nothing more, waiting for my response. I knew where this was going but I decided to play coy and ignorant for a while longer.

  “Well this is all very interesting,” I said, affecting a nonchalance I didn’t feel.

  Hubert sat back and folded his arms, his eyes narrowing. Stillman shot me an expression that suggested she knew I was stalling. I didn’t care because I wanted them to lay it all on the line for me. Hubert seemed to realise this and wagged a finger in the direction of the laptop.

  “When I received those images from Major Power, I had all comms traffic from that area flagged and directed to me. Within a few hours we’d intercepted a 911 call from exactly those co-ordinates. Local law enforcement was going to ignore it because the caller hung up. Colleen here was on the ball and got them to follow it through, also getting a couple of our agents to tag along. They were there within two hours, almost the same time
as the local patrol.”

  Stillman leaned forward, hands on knees. “Our team found some guy climbing out of the crater. A Professor of palaeontology called Gabriel Connor. He said he was alone, but the evidence we found indicates otherwise. According to the agents on site he was fairly evasive, to say the least.”

  She let this hang in the air and the rest of the gang looked at me, waiting. Hubert folded his arms, giving me a smug look.

  “But of course you know all this, don’t you Dr Morgan?”

  I took a deep breath. Time to share.

  “Sure, okay. The local PD, guy called Woods, is the sheriff. Took me to Pahrump where I met Connor. I heard his story.”

  Hubert remained impassive. “I believe he gave testimony that he was alone in the crater.”

  I said nothing. I wasn’t sure I was ready to talk about the subsequent conversation I’d had with Connor in my office. Not until I got some answers from these guys. Stillman leaned in and her dark eyes bored into mine. I tried to hold her stare, but I blinked first. She gave a little smile of victory. The bad cop-good cop routine?

  The good cop, Hubert leaned in again. “What can you tell us about Adam Benedict, Dr Morgan?”

  I folded my arms. “You first.”

  Hubert looked at me strangely for a second before pursing his lips and tapping the table in front of me. “Fair enough. Would you be so kind as to look inside that envelope?”

  I was starting to feel trapped and nervous. I thought about refusing but things were moving fast, and I really needed to get my head around all of this. I picked up the envelope and made a show of turning it around a few times before using my nail to tear the seam and tip the contents out onto the table.

  Photographs.

  The top-most one was the picture I’d taken on my phone of Adam at the hospital. The others were screenshots of his CT scans, blown up in high resolution. I picked up the brain scan and once again marvelled at the symmetry and the sheer ‘normality’ of it.

  I shrugged, “So what?”

  Stillman reached forward and tapped a purple fingernail on the scan. “We obtained these from the radiologist, your Dr Navarro. He sent them to a colleague in Vegas, who saw sense and forwarded them to us.”

  “Okay, well then you’ll know that there’s nothing abnormal to see on these images,” I countered.

  “Dr Navarro was concerned about an interference pattern which he couldn’t explain, or correct for,” said Holland. “By all accounts, Navarro is a bit OCD. Lucky for us, it turned out. He was concerned that he’d calibrated the scanners wrongly or that maybe there was a fault in his highly expensive government-owned equipment.”

  I picked up another photograph, an aerial shot of the crater we had just seen on the laptop. A time-lapse that showed a sequence of increasingly bright lights emanating from within it, similar to the images we’d just reviewed on the laptop. I flicked it back onto the table. Stillman glanced at Holland who picked it up and holding it up in front of me, he pointed to the light emanating from the centre of the crater.

  “This anomaly - for want of a better word - exhibits a periodicity approximating twenty four hours and lasts for less than five minutes.”

  “Anomaly?” I said, eyebrows raised.

  He looked at me with an even stranger intensity before taking his glasses off and cleaning them on his T-shirt again. Clearly a nervous tic.

  “We’ve spent the last week analysing this photograph using the most advanced technology we have. We’re still no further forwards as to its nature.”

  Hubert unfolded his arms and leaned in. “But it isn’t a naturally occurring phenomenon, that’s for sure.”

  I reached for the Kraken, but Hubert gently stopped me with his hand. “Kate, I don’t know what Adam Benedict has told you, but he isn’t who he says he is.”

  Stillman closed her laptop and looked at me. “You’re the most important person in this room now. You’ve spent time in his presence, in his company. This is … unprecedented.”

  I was feeling dizzy and it wasn’t just the Kraken. I looked out of the window at the lightening sky and blinked as the sun poked around the curtains.

  “Kate, Adam Benedict was in this very crater when the anomaly appeared,” said Hubert. “Connor lied to the police, of that I’m sure. A few days later Adam Benedict - or something resembling him - was brought into your Emergency Room.”

  He deliberately reached into an inside pocket and brought out a second brown envelope. He tipped out another stack of photographs and fanned them out on the table, face up. I picked up the topmost photograph. On it was an x-ray of a human figure. The external shape was that of a male, but the internal structure was wrong. There was an outer layer a couple of millimetres thick but no inner layer. No bones or organs or any recognisable human anatomy at all. In the middle of the chest was a sphere roughly the size of a golf ball, with dozens of small protuberances on its surface. There were thin gossamer-like filaments emanating from it, spreading out in all directions, connecting everything. I could just make out the vague outline of eyes and a mouth, but where the brain should be was a rhomboid-shaped object a couple of inches in diameter, free-floating in the cranium. More filaments from the sphere could be seen extending up to it and wrapping it in concentric circles.

  I looked up. “I don’t understand. This isn’t a human being.”

  Hubert sat back and crossed his knees. “That’s Adam Benedict. The scans you saw were deliberately distorted and altered.”

  “By who?”

  “By him. We don’t know how, but I presume in the same way that your monitors were tricked into displaying apparently normal vital statistics.”

  I stared at the photograph. “No, that isn’t possible. I’ve spoken with him, been with him. I’ve felt him… sensed his emotions. Something’s happened to him, yes, but… he’s not this … machine.”

  “How do you know?” said Stillman earnestly. “You’d never met Adam Benedict before. How do you know that was he? Have you heard of the Turing Test?”

  I put my head in my hands and ran my fingers through my hair. Despite the shower, I could still smell cordite and gunpowder on my fingers and my nails were cracked. The edges of my hands were all scraped and bruised and I brought them up in front of my eyes and turned them slowly. Fingerprints, veins, bones, tendons. Human accoutrements. I looked up and saw that they were all waiting for my reply. I felt overwhelmed and tears started to well up in my eyes.

  “Yes I have heard of the Turing Test, and no I wasn’t speaking with an A.I. - Adam is a human being. We shared … memories. He opened my mind to hidden places. Traumatic memories that I’d suppressed.” Tears were flowing now and I brushed them away with my sleeve. The floodgates had opened and the words poured out. “He let me in to his head, and I felt his emotions, his sorrow and his anguish. He’d found his wife murdered. It was real. I can’t prove it to you, but I just know it was real.” I hugged my knees and buried my head, rocking slowly backward and forward.

  “I believe you,” I heard Hubert say softly.

  Stillman reached over and gave me a handkerchief. I accepted it gratefully and blew my nose loudly.

  There was a pause and then Hubert said, “Kate, you need to understand - that isn’t Adam Benedict. It may be his mind, his consciousness, but it sure isn’t his body.”

  I jerked upright as realisation dawned. “Oh my God.”

  “What?” said Hubert.

  I looked around at them all, wide-eyed. “I don’t think he knows exactly what he is. He told me he was ‘saved’ … as he put it. Restored back to life. He thinks he’s still human, more or less, not a machine!”

  Holland sat back and interlaced his fingers behind his head. “Who does he think ‘saved’ him?”

  I stared blankly out of the window and I caught my reflection, pale and drawn. I took a deep breath and plunged in. “He said he died and was brought back to life by aliens.”

  Stillman raised her eyebrows and sneaked a sideways glan
ce at Hubert who was staring at me, an intense expression on his face.

  “One of them has come back with him,” I continued. “It’s in his head. No, in that machine.” I pointed at the photograph.

  A weird smile appeared on Holland’s face. “So this alien - it controls him?”

  I nodded slowly. “I think it’s trying to - there’s definitely a conflict going on in there.”

  “Why is he here?” asked Hubert. “Why was he sent back? What else do you know?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think he knows what he’s doing here. During our last conversation, he was wondering whether he was some kind of envoy, or intermediary. Like John the Baptist, you know, clearing the way for Jesus Christ and all that…”

  “Great analogy,” said Holland, sarcastically. He shot a look at Hubert. “The herald of the apocalypse. Wait until the evangelists hear about this.”

  Hubert ignored him. “Are there any more aliens here? Is it just the one?”

  “I don’t know. I took a deep breath. “What I do know is that Adam said that we are all ‘in danger’.”

  Holland looked pointedly at Hubert. “That anomaly - whatever it is - is the key. We need to figure it out, learn how it works.”

  “What are we going to do about Adam?” I asked. “I mean, do we even know if he survived the helicopter crash?”

  “We have to assume that he did indeed survive,” said Holland gravely.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Deer Ridge

  Hubert twisted in his chair and flicked the blinds down behind me. Shadows darkened and criss-crossed the room and lights automatically came on around the bar. Holland had wandered over and was looking for a drink, and the two NASA employees were on their mobile phones, texting or Facebooking, I had no idea. Hubert settled back into the couch in front of me and took his jacket off. I was expecting a shoulder holster at least, but was disappointed to see his pants held up by yellow and blue stripy braces. He saw me looking and gave a smile as if to say ‘I’m the director of the FBI I can wear what the fuck I like’. He started to roll up his sleeves, and turned to Stillman who was back tap-tapping into the laptop.