ERO

by F. P. Dorchak

  “Yeah?”

  “I loved waking up to you jumping my bones.”

  “Did you, now? I thought girls didn’t like making whoopee right after waking up.”

  “That’s because they don’t sleep with you,” she said, squeezing his hand, “and they better not—ever!”

  “What’re you saying?” Cherko asked, looking between the road and her. “You want an exclusive relationship? Cause, if you are, better let me know, now, so I can cancel that other date—”

  Erica again hit him.

  “Ow!”

  “That’s not funny!” she said, frowning and crossing her arms.

  “Kidding! Was just kidding!”

  “I know,” she said, with a pouty smile. Then she reached over toward his legs. “I want you all for myself!”

  * * *

  Highway 50, West of Pueblo, Colorado

  1400 Hours Mountain Time

  Cherko leaned across the hood of the car, staring south. He held a map under his hands against the occasional light gusts of wind. Another small herd of pronghorn grazed directly out before his view. He focused on them. Pronghorn.

  Deer.

  Road

  Storm.

  Mother....

  His eyes drifted upward towards the clouds. They looked peculiar, swirling. Felt out of the ordinary. He looked back down to the fields before him. There seemed to be something that called out to him from down there.

  He looked to the map and saw the Great Sand Dunes National Monument was directly south.

  Sand Dunes... in Colorado?

  Cherko looked back up into the sky.

  Not only had he mentally flattened sine waves, but he’d also made these points—a bunch of electronic dots—come together in another training session. Several electronic points on a screen, separated by various distances, and he—again, through only the use of his mind—had been able to bring them together. Each and every one.

  In training for over a month, and he’d been able to do that?

  To what end?

  But again, was he even doing this, or was some hidden government flunky, hiding behind some Oz-like curtain, doing all the electronic manipulation, only making him think he was doing it?

  Why would the government be training him to do this stuff? Why wouldn’t they tell him? They just send a van around to pick him up after work, take him to some clandestine location, then force him into a training program over which he had no say—but at which he seemed to outright excel.

  For what purpose?

  He’d always wanted some super-sexy job, all right, and apparently that’s just what he got. He just didn’t know what it was.

  You are not authorized an answer....

  Be careful what you wish for.

  Cherko reached out to the cloud with his mind. What was up there, and what did “cloudness” feel like....

  Erica popped up on the other side of the car.

  “Much better!” she exclaimed, schooching up and wiggling back into her jeans.

  Cherko smiled. “Feel better, now, do we?”

  “Yup!”

  “Couldn’t have gone back in Salida, huh?”

  “Didn’t have to.”

  “I see,” he said, nodding. “I must admit, I’ve never before been with a girl who peed alongside roads.”

  “I’m unique,” she said in a playful lilt. Erica smoothed out her attire, tossed back her hair, then casually hopped back into the car.

  “You certainly appear to be.”

  2

  Unknown Location

  15 January 1986

  0110 Hours Mountain Time

  Cherko sat before his screen as still-images flashed up before him on the large glass behind his workstation. As images of everything from flowers and insects to world and cosmic events flashed before him, the sine wave boxes lit up in various degrees of flattening, in rapid-fire combinations, many at a time on his screen. Without warning, the still-images changed to video, and the sine wave boxes mirrored the video images at a blinding rate of speed... all of which Cherko took in easily.

  Some were pleasing. Some not so. Images of humans, animals, flowers, and insects. Of a bee pollinating a flower.

  Of WWII carpet bombing of Germany.

  Of JFK speaking to the American public.

  Of a Saturn V launch and subsequent moon shots.

  All he took in and assimilated without the faintest idea why.

  Then everything went blank.

  “Your progress has been most curious,” came the soft voice.

  Thank you, Cherko mentally replied.

  “We had not anticipated your degree of ability, though it was probable. Your degree of mastery is extraordinary.

  “During contact,” the voice continued, “you will receive information and input it into whatever workstation you are working before. You will do this by the following procedure, which you are to mimic as I voice it.”

  “Copy that,” Cherko said.

  “Select the right trackball switch...”

  Cherko selected his workstation’s trackball switch to the right of the computer monitor.

  “... while holding down the right trackball switch, select the F10 key.”

  Cherko did as instructed. He saw a dialog box appear on-screen with a blank entry field.

  “A dialog window appears. In that blank field, you will enter your password. Enter the word ‘password,’ now. You will be prompted to enter a new one. Use the constraints for passwords from your other responsibility.

  “Do this now.”

  Cherko did as instructed, and came up with a new password.

  “You will now get a blank screen on which you will enter all future communications. All entries will be blacked out—even while typing—for obvious security considerations. After each entry, or string, you will enter a forward slash, and at the end of each report you will enter three forward slashes.”

  “But how will I know what I’m typing if I can’t see what I’m—”

  “Practice.”

  “Okay...”

  “When complete, you will select only F10. When you hit the first F10 and trackball switch, this blank screen remains in the background, so you can seemingly continue on with what you are doing in your official capacity while entering your program data. Do you understand.”

  “Affirmative.”

  “That is all.”

  Cherko sat, casually looking around the room.

  “Where am I?”

  “You are not—”

  Authorized an answer, Cherko finished. Fine.

  “We are complete.”

  I’m done?

  “Affirmative.”

  “What do I do now? Do I ever come back?”

  “That is no longer necessary. You will practice your data entry at your other responsibility, which we will monitor. You will be contacted when you are ready.”

  “By whom?”

  Silence. All displays went blank, and the lighting dimmed.

  Cherko got to his feet; retrieved his jacket. He stepped back from his console and stared at it. Then he turned and entered the elevator for the last time.

  3

  Cherko lay in bed, staring into the ceiling.

  Had he really been attending clandestine training sessions in some unknown location?

  Had he really had mental discussions with... whomever?

  And had he really influenced electronics through the use of nothing but thought?

  None of this seemed real in the light of day. Even his ERO job was unreal. The only thing that seemed any kind of real was Erica. She was his only apparent life outside of work. Face it, he went to training at unusual hours, and arrived home tired, exhausted. And all he did outside of work was work out and see Erica.

  His life suddenly seemed quite unreal.

  He’d come a long way from that upstate New York kid. Reality had come knocking and had come knocking hard. Though his work seemed exciting, it all felt... fuzzy. He did stuff h
e couldn’t tell anyone.

  But what was the big deal?

  He tracked and looked in on satellites? Okay, so he seemed to be able to influence electronics with his mind, which was kind of spooky, yet downright cool, but he could think of all kinds of uses for that.

  Scary uses.

  What was he becoming?

  What was his real mission?

  And that disembodied voice... he’d considered all kinds of possibilities about that. Could someone really telepathically communicate with him?

  Or was it something else?

  Not only did the voice sound slightly off, it felt... different.

  Alien.

  Really alien.

  This was just all way too out there to believe. It brought up way too many other issues, like... if he was being trained by an alien, then the government was obviously in on it. The van. Turnbull.

  Why?

  And not just any “why?,” but why would aliens need to work with our government? Weren’t they supposed to be so far in advance of us that they shouldn’t require our assistance for anything?

  It just felt like an alien was goddamned training him!

  How do you get past that?

  Cherko got out of bed and entered the living room. Looked about his empty apartment.

  At one point he’d been a 14-year-old kid with romantic notions of warp speed star travel and green women.

  At one point he’d been an average student in high school who’d gotten a Most Improved Student award.

  At one point he’d been in college studying physics and having a hard time of it.

  And at one point he’d been in the right seat of a T-37, trying to dead reckon a new course as mountains came up real fast, his navigator IP whacking him up aside the head. Commanding him to think, dammit!

  And now... now he was standing in the middle of an empty apartment with a new life looming before him like an approaching thunderstorm. One about which he wasn’t sure he felt all that comfortable.

  4

  ERO Operations

  5 March 1986

  2330 Hours Mountain Time

  First Lieutenant Jimmy Cherko entered the ERO ops floor. Major Turnbull was talking to several crew members when he looked up.

  “Evening Lieutenant,” he said.

  “How you doing, sir,” Cherko said.

  “Need to see you. You can change over when I’m done.”

  Cherko looked to the gathering of operators preparing for shift change, and nodded. Cherko followed Turnbull off the floor.

  * * *

  The two entered Turnbull’s office. Cherko had more images of him standing with others—others not in uniform.

  Turnbull locked the door; Cherko took his seat in the usual chair. Turnbull went back behind his desk.

  Did Turnbull know he was being trained by an alien?

  “Everything going well?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Typing?”

  “Going great, actually. I’ve done some before, so it’s not too bad, though it’s been a while.”

  “Good.”

  Cherko and Turnbull sat in silence for a moment.

  “Sir... do you know much about what I’m to be doing?”

  Turnbull leaned forward over the desk. He formed a pensive steeple with his fingers to his lips.

  “Lieutenant... we both do as we’re told. Nothing more.”

  Cherko nodded.

  “That is all,” Turnbull said, sitting back upright.

  “That’s it?”

  “Just wanted to see how you’re doing.”

  That is all. Seems like he was to hear a lot of that.

  Cherko got to his feet; left the office.

  Returning to the ops floor, Cherko took his briefing, and took over his position on console. Without warning or fanfare, it came.

  Prepare for information string.

  “What?” Cherko said out loud, immediately looking to his crew members. No one had noticed his outburst; they were all still talking among themselves.

  Is this my “contact,” Cherko mentally asked.

  Prepare.

  Cherko casually looked around, hit the right trackball switch on his console panel, then F10. A dialog box, like what he’d been trained on, appeared. He quickly entered his password and it disappeared.

  Ready, he sent back.

  The communication came unnervingly clear as a bell.

  There was no mistaking it for some stray or crazy thoughts. And there were several-second pauses between each information string. When Cherko felt he’d fat-fingered an entry, he asked for and was granted a pause and retransmission. There would be just enough pause for him to backspace over the mistyped entry, and then the data was resent. After each pause he entered a “/” and at the end of the communication, he entered “///”. What he typed, but couldn’t physically see was:

  77900/849657/86115876557/8316/98999

  77900/65468438/68488/6841385/5812

  77900/5782/425646556/545/54845685584///

  Communication terminated.

  Is that it? Cherko asked, but there came no reply.

  Cherko waited several seconds, and when there was, indeed, no further communication, Cherko closed his invisible window by again hitting F10. He again looked to his crew members, but they were busy with their own duties. Cherko sat back, scratched the back of his neck, and grimaced.

  That was it?

  This was his huge, new, can’t-tell-a-soul mission?

  No pictures, no mental video? Just bland old numeric streams? No “How ya doin—how’s the weather on Earth”—just prepare and terminate?

  As well as he’d done in training, as much as he’d been trained to do this, he’d severely had his doubts that all he was being shown could possibly be real, that it was really going to happen.

  Yet here he was.

  It’d happened exactly as he’d been trained, and he’d performed exactly as he’d been trained. It was real, and there was no denying it. He hadn’t made up the material that entered his mind. He hadn’t made up the voice he’d heard. There was a decidedly detached and, yes—in more ways than one—alien sense to the contact, the communication.

  It was a gut feeling.

  It was like he was the Go-Between, the translator, between whatever the aliens were doing out there, and what the government was somehow complicit in. But there was no way to yet tell what was going on, because it was all numbers, numbers that just weren’t yielding up any of their secrets.

  Except that there was one string that recurred.

  One string of numbers had been repeated. Seven-seven-nine-something. Zero-zero. Interesting. And when he’d gotten those numbers all three times, he felt something about them. Like they were related to a position. His position.

  77900.

  Like it was his positional designator.

  And there was something else he realized about the communication... unlike his training, this communication felt like a good interior mind-scratch. Like getting your back scratched, only it was his mind getting back-scratched.

  Chapter Ten

  1

  Jimmy Cherko, Air Force First Lieutenant, one each, sat low (and in poor posture, his mother would have lovingly chided) on his apartment’s couch, casually channel surfing his TV. It was after midnight, and he’d just finished watching a sci-fi movie, the name of which he’d already forgotten. It had been okay. But he hated when movies took the short route to advancing their plots, rather than sticking to more real-life specifics, creating a therefore more realistic and challenging storyline. He should write something. Perhaps based on his life—without getting him into trouble, of course. Something based on his life story....

  Yeah, he could do it.

  Jimmy hit a channel showing Ted Nugent, rock star, bowhunting deer.

  The Nuge.

  An unlucky buck hung from a tree branch. Nuge and his buddies were gathered around it, discussing their bagged trophy, and clips from various parts of the show
shown earlier flashed up as the end credits rolled.

  Deer.

  Road.

  Mom.

  Jimmy’s eyes, heavy with sleep, rolled closed.

  Deer and his mom. A storm....

  * * *

  Town of Harrietstown, New York

  7 July 1976

  1541 Hours Eastern Time

  Fifteen-year-old Jimmy Cherko pumped the pedals of his Scwhinn ten-speed as hard as he could along a deserted stretch of New York’s Route 186 between the Lake Clear Airport and Lake Clear Junction. He had a good couple miles to go before he made it home. The growing July storm was starting to manifest itself into something fierce, and he really didn’t want to get caught in it—but may not have a choice. It was stupid of him to have ridden his bike into town today and stayed so long; his dad had clearly told him an afternoon thunderstorm was forecast. Yet here he found himself. Independence was one thing, but getting struck by lightning quite another.

  Jimmy pumped the pedals and almost lost it, as the bike weaved from unevenly applied weight to the pedals and caught an edge of blacktop. Up on the pedals and leaning low over the handlebars, he glanced behind him before lifting his head back up and looking forward.

  Please, God, hold off the rain, he prayed, please let me get home first!

  Next thing he knew, Jimmy was running headlong toward his bike.

  A bike which now lay tangled up on the shoulder along Route 186 before him... one of its wheels upright in the air and still spinning.

  He was on his feet?

  Jimmy skidded to a stop, mouth open, hands spread out about him as if for balance. Gasped for breath.

  Looked behind him.

  Back to his bike.

  How... what the....

  He looked up to the sky.

  Deer?

  Looking back to his bike, Jimmy found himself standing in the middle of a herd of white-tailed deer.

  He blinked. Looked to the still spinning wheel of his Schwinn.

  He faced opposite the direction he’d been traveling.