by Dave Walsh
When presented with an anomaly, most scientists treat it as such; many become obsessed with it and even deify it in a way. Yet all of the information that came up about the Mars Monolith was very to the point.
The Mars Monolith was originally spotted by a 2005 probe called the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, or the MRO. It was a strange rectangular object jutting out from the rather barren Martian landscape. After a few years, its was quickly written off as simply a fallen stone from a nearby rock formation that broke off in a near-perfect shape and did not seem to be surrounded by any other debris. It was exactly the kind of object that would drive a scientist stuck on Earth with just photographs from a probe mad. The fact that it was so easily written off seemed to fit the bill. Jonah stared entranced at the photograph of the rock jutting out from the ground.
There were definitely similarities between this and their mystery object. Both things were scientific curiosities that demanded further investigation, and the publicly released stories about them tended to come across as flat and dismissive. To the untrained eye, there was nothing wrong. But in all truth, there was a lot wrong with both stories.
His search of the wire came up with no news stories. He had to broaden his search and send it all the way back in an attempt to scoop up something about the Mars Monolith. Still nothing, just a few of the wire-released stories from around the same period. This meant that he had to broaden his search again to Mars discoveries and news in general.
They had all of their government communications documented, and Jonah knew without a doubt that something like this would have come down through this department. Mars discoveries from the ten years following 2005 meant a lot more stories to filter through. And they were all from different sources, including NASA and different government agencies, but there were only two through the Ministry. These were exactly what Jonah was looking for.
He quickly downloaded both of them to his holoscanner and looked around his desk. He was trying to be as inconspicuous as he could, which was always a bit of a challenge, due to the open layout of the office and how everyone drifted around. The content on one’s screen was never sacred. It always seemed a bit confusing to him that they dealt with such sensitive content all of the time, but everyone treated it like they were working somewhere that was relaxed. Jonah sunk back into his chair and opened up the first story, his eyes quickly scanning it in near disbelief.
The first communication was what he had expected: concise, to the point and quickly writing off the item as simply a rock that happened to stand out. Jonah imagined that back then, during a time of such open communication, events like the Mars Monolith had to be frustrating for agencies like his own, which liked to keep everything under strict lock and key. The second communication was a lot more interesting because the story had apparently not stuck as well as they would have liked. People were openly questioning the object found on Mars and writing off the official communications for the rubbish that they were. It made Jonah laugh under his breath, and he shook his head.
We cannot overstate this: This story must be kept under control without much attention being paid to it. There are multiple protocols in place in case of events like this, which must be followed to ensure the optimal outcome. No more attention must be brought to this story in an official capacity; instead the protocols for third-party organizations to issue news regarding the anomaly should be followed to help control the story.
The language felt forced, like it was trying to remain official, calm and assertive, but it was beginning to fall apart. The implications of that message meant that any number of the stories released around that time period about the Monolith could be “official” and simply appear to be from sources that were not the government. Clearly, if the rock was the nothing that they claimed it was, they wouldn’t need to be that concerned.
There was no way that Jonah would be able to determine which stories were which, so he quickly pulled as many as he could from after that date and downloaded them to his holoscanner. He looked through the list and sighed. He would have to get this information to Professor Cox as soon as possible.
“Hi Jonah.” A voice snapped him away from his screen. He looked up to see Jillian, a usually quiet girl who always dressed very conservatively and somehow found a way to rub him the wrong way. “So we're all pitching in to get a cake for Andrea’s birthday next week,” she said quietly, almost whispering.
“Okay.” Jonah furrowed his brow, looking up at her and trying to mask his frustration with being bothered, especially over something so trivial. After a few seconds of silence, Jonah sighed, “So?”
“So we were wondering if you wanted to --”
“Yeah, fine,” he snapped, realizing that he was probably coming across as more than a little rude. “How much?”
“So we were thinking about maybe five each and...” She trailed off, not making eye contact with him. He knew that she was friendly with Andrea and that Andrea thought less and less of him with each passing day, so he could only imagine what Jillian thought of him. Not that it mattered much. It was a strange feeling knowing that there were some people who thought that he was a monster, a commoner who weaseled his way into their neat and tidy world and didn’t belong there.
“Five, great.” He shifted in his chair, reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of credits, sifting through them until he found a five note. He yanked it free and held it out to her. “Here.”
“Well,” she said. Jonah was unable to hold back his contempt and let out an audible sigh. He immediately regretted it, hearing her voice quiver a bit. “We were going to wait until next week to collect.”
“Could you just take it now?” He held the note in the air. How hard was it for them to steal money from him? “You know that I’ll forget by then.”
“Okay,” she said as she sheepishly pulled it out of his hand and started to walk away before holding it up and smiling, finally making eye contact with him. “Thanks.”
“Yup,” he said, forcing a smile. “Happy to help.”
His eyes remained on her while she walked away. If anyone was watching him now, they’d see the look of disgust on his face, and for that, he felt guilty. She wasn’t a bad person, just misguided, he thought.
A part of him was genuinely bothered by people who refused to actually get to know him and just judged him from the opinions of others, but he knew that he wasn’t always the easiest person to deal with, as that exchange showed him. He didn’t mean to be rude to her; she just interrupted him at the wrong time.
“What did you have to talk about with her?” The sound of Kara’s voice came over his shoulder, with the sound of disgust evident on the “her.”
“She wanted money,” Jonah answered as he turned his chair around to face her. “Andrea’s birthday cake or whatever,” he explained, trying to keep his voice soft.
“Oh.” She looked down. “Well, no one has said anything to me yet.”
“Yeah, well.” He rolled his eyes. “It’s next week, I think. So I’m sure you're due for a visit soon.”
“Oh,” she said. She started to walk off, and Jonah could feel himself panic a bit; he always felt uneasy when their conversations were left like that.
“Kara, wait,” he said, forcing her to stop and turn around.
“What?” she whispered. “I can’t spend too much time here or people will find out.”
“Right, but...” There were too many secrets swimming around in his head at that moment for him to find value in the whole “secret” of their relationship, not like it had ever made sense to him in the first place. “Can I come by tonight?”
“Fine.” She turned and walked away, leaving Jonah feeling like less than dirt. “Fine” was somehow worse than her “oh.”
* * *
“I feel like I’ve lost my way,” Jonah could hear himself saying, once again inside of Professor Cox’s lab, sitting in a stool with a short back, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed.
“What?
” Professor Cox glanced over at him from across the room, peeling his eyes away from the screens in front of him and letting his glasses slip down his nose before he pulled his finger up to push them back up his nose. “This was precisely what we were looking for.”
“No, I know,” Jonah said. He stared off at the wall. It was always difficult talking about personal relationships with Professor Cox, a guy who had a life and lost it all before burying himself in his work without showing much emotion. “I don’t mean with that. I mean just in life, in general.”
“I don’t understand,” the professor said as he turned to face him, slapping his hands down onto his knees and leaning forward. “Is it that girl again? What’s her name? Lara?”
“Kara,” Jonah corrected him half-heartedly. “But close enough. I mean, I guess. I think that I’m supposed to go over there tonight, but she didn’t seem that excited, things with her have just been...”
“Tough? Jonah, look.” The professor looked up toward the ceiling and paused, swallowing hard before nodding and looking back at Jonah. “I’m not good with this stuff, with-- ”
He paused and threw his hands up. “With love and all of that. I mean, look at me. You want to know what I’m good at? This,” he said, motioning toward the computers and the equipment. “I’m good with science, with evidence and theories, not with people. If it wasn’t for you, well, I am not sure whom I’d have conversations with or whom I’d share ideas with.”
“That doesn’t exactly make my problems easier, Doc.” He appreciated the effort, but the talk was just as awkward as he imagined it would be.
The professor leaned forward again, craning his neck toward Jonah. “I’m not trying to tell you what to do or oversimplify your problems, but we are hurtling through space in a giant metal tube that is moving just shy of the speed of light, and that isn’t the problem.
“No, the problem is that we are moving at nearly the speed of light toward a planet that we are nowhere near as educated on as we pretend to be, and I feel like there is a lot that we do not know. We know that there is a lot that we do not know. And that... that thing that we found in space. We both know that it was not of Russian design.
“There is something wrong here, and this discovery of the Martian Monolith is proof that this isn’t the first time. Have you seen the photos?”
“Photos?” Jonah looked at the professor, puzzled. “What photos?”
“Oh, Jonah, come here.” He turned back to the screen and slid his fingers quickly back and forth before pulling up a photograph and zooming in on an object. He showed the screen to Jonah, who was now standing over his shoulder. “Look.”
Jonah looked down at the screen, and his jaw dropped open in disbelief. The other photos that he had seen of the object looked exactly like the rest of the Martian surface: a light brown hue like any other rock on the planet. This was different. This was shiny and black, much like the object that they had found floating in space. The edges were so perfect -- there was just no way that this was native to that planet. If anything, it looks like it was placed there, like it was intentional.
“I don’t believe it,” he muttered under his breath. “Why...”
“Why does it look so different from the photographs that we’ve seen? Good question,” he said as he pulled up a few of the official photos and pointed at them. “Look, there, see? Brown, just like everything else, blending in. This was doctored, Jonah. This photo has been altered.”
“How did you get one that wasn’t?”
“Access to certain satellite photograph databases from that period, trying to find photographs of it. There were a good number of them, all of them doctored, until I came across this one. This one appears to be the real thing.”
“How do you know that?” Jonah asked, shaking his head and crossing his arms. “How do you know that this one isn’t the doctored one and that the rest are real?”
“The Russians,” the professor stated matter-of-factly.
“Not the Russians again.” Jonah felt a headache approaching. He staggered over to the counter and leaned up against it. “We’ve already proven that Russians had nothing to do with what we found.”
“I agree.”
“Then...”
“Then this photograph was from a Russian satellite, one that was never cleared to be photographing Mars during a NASA mission.”
“What?”
“It was in no records anywhere, but in my research, I found that there was an off-chance that it would have been in that general vicinity, so I thought it was worth a shot...”
“You are fucking brilliant,” Jonah exclaimed, patting Professor Cox on the shoulder and shaking him gently. “So this photograph never existed in an official capacity, so there was no way that they would have doctored it.”
“Precisely,” he said, his eyes fixed on the screen. “So what did you find?”
“A lot,” Jonah answered. He picked up his holoscanner from the table behind him and quickly highlighted the files that he had acquired and dragged them over to Professor Cox’s. “This is all that I found,” he said, speaking over the projection while he kept his gaze fixed on it.
“I’m not sure how to organize this,” Professor Cox said, looking at Jonah and then back to the screen. “I only see two official communications here. One of them more interesting than the other, but still...”
“No, see,” Jonah said as he pointed to his screen. “Read the second one carefully, and you’ll see why I included all of those other articles. I think that some -- if not all of these -- are from the Ministry to help cover this up. Well, this was pre-Ministry, obviously, but they had their own version back then. ”
“Oh,” the professor said as he nodded, a smile quickly appearing on his face. “Oh. Oh!” He burst out laughing, turning his chair to face Jonah. He placed his arms on his shoulders and clenched them tightly. “Amazing work.”
“Thanks,” Jonah said, a bit embarrassed and overwhelmed by the kind words from the professor. “I, uh, I’m not done sorting through them because there are so many, but I’m sure that there is something of value in there.”
“No,” the professor said, hanging his head and shaking it back and forth. “I fear that there isn’t anything of worth in here -- of course, I mean, outside of their existence. The content is negligible at best. What we care about is that they went through a lot of trouble to ensure that this story was squashed. It is exactly what happened here, with us.
“Sadly we aren’t going to get any new information through these communications,” he said. He spun around in his chair one full turn, almost like a child who couldn’t contain himself. “You see what we’ve discovered, don’t you?”
“Proof?”
“Proof!” He jumped out of his chair, massaging his chin with his thumb and his forefinger as he paced back and forth. “This is truly astonishing, but at the same time...”
“At the same time, what?” Jonah could feel a knot in his stomach growing, almost not wanting to know what the professor meant by his pause.
“Well,” the professor began before he slumped back into his chair, and it slightly adjusted for his weight. “It is quite frightful, to be honest. Not only are we in a metal tube hurtling toward the unknown, but the unknown has a path of debris leading up to it that is being covered up -- not just now, but throughout our history as space-faring beings. There is something very wrong here.”
“How long until we reach the planet?” Jonah asked, his mind now racing at the possibilities.
“About three weeks, I think,” he answered as he turned back to his screen and pulled up a calendar. He nodded at the countdown. “Three short weeks.”
“What are the chances that we are heading into something dangerous, Doc?”
“With this latest evidence?”
He paused, shaking his head. Professor Cox pulled the glasses off of his face and rubbed his eyes with his free hand before placing them back on. “I’d have to run calculations to be exact, but I th
ink that the likelihood is, well, incredibly likely.”
“So,” Jonah said. “What do we do now?” he asked, almost wondering aloud and not expecting an answer from the professor.
“Try to find a way to figure out exactly what the Ministry knows about all of this, and what they are doing with that part we found,” the professor said quietly, almost to himself.
“That’s easier said than done; we don’t have any leads,” Jonah said.
“Well, not exactly,” Professor Cox corrected him, sounding apprehensive.
“Oh?”
“I came across a name in some of my research, and he’s aboard this ship.” Professor Cox pulled up a file of an older man on his screen. The man looked haggard but inviting. He had a bushy white mustache and was balding.
“Communications Minister McMahon?” Jonah read the name aloud, questioning it. “I’ve never heard of him.”
“He was before your time, obviously.” The professor bit his bottom lip. “But he was dismissed from his position almost thirty years ago now, without there being any real notes as to why. From what I’ve been able to glean, he’s still receiving a Ministry pension.”
“Okay, that's kind of weird, isn’t it?”
“It is, and it isn’t,” he said. “Retired Ministers get pensions, sure, but ones that were dismissed? No. We haven’t been able to find much other than the Mars Monolith, though. Maybe they’ve just been covering it up. I don’t know. I just thought that this guy might know something.”
“So what do we do, just have a meeting with him?” Jonah asked.
“Well,” Professor Cox said as he turned to Jonah. “How do you feel about playing spy and going on your own?”
