Then the kid turned around, and looked right at Annie.
It was Rick Horton.
Annie gasped.
Cora put her hand on Annie’s wrist and started whispering into her sleeve, to Yount, who began scanning the crowd somewhat more intently.
“What is it?” Cora asked again.
Rick nodded at Annie, turned, and left the cafeteria. Annie couldn’t speak.
“Annie,” Cora said, urgently, and loudly enough for everyone else at the table to take notice.
“The guy,” Annie said. “Rick. His name is Rick. See if Yount can stop him. He’s leaving.”
“Which guy? Can you describe him?”
“I… no, forget it. It’s… it’s probably me. Never mind, tell him to never mind, I made a mistake.”
“Annie.”
“I thought I saw someone, that’s all,” Annie said. “But I was wrong. I thought I saw Rick Horton.”
“How do you know you were wrong?”
“Because Rick’s been dead for more than two years.”
2
Flowers for Algernon
So, the question: Is the man in this photo the mysterious Mr. X, at long last?
You’ve heard the theory by now, especially if you’re a Collinsworthy regular. X—the government operative (or local guy, or secret alien…) was there, and nobody talks about him. He fills in all the gaps in the narrative.
Unless he doesn’t, and Mr. X doesn’t exist.
We at Collinsworthy think he’s real, but we don’t know if this is him. If you recognize the man in the photograph, drop us a line!
Canny Ollins, from “New photos of the Mysterious Mister X”
The United States Army had a very large telescope.
It wasn’t precisely public knowledge, this telescope, partly because it didn’t look much like one. It was an array of devices shaped like a T, sitting on the bare side of a mountaintop in northern California, on the other side of an intimidatingly tall fence at the end of a private road, underneath a no-fly zone. This didn’t mean it was 100% secret, but it did mean that knowing it existed required a lot more work than most people were willing to invest, because the payout for discovering a secret telescope just was not all that huge.
For a brief time, the facility—it was called Project Algernon, but most people called it Algie—was one of the most important places in the world. All of the data about the Sorrow Falls landing that was collected by the government ultimately lived on servers inside this base. As a requirement of an international treaty agreement, all of that data was accessible on a profoundly secure cloud drive, and that was how most of the people who used the drive thought of it: as a store of information in a non-physical ‘cloud’ that was a part of the Internet at large. But the data on the drive was stored on the servers at Algie.
In addition to the server room, and the control center/laboratory for the radio telescope array, Project Algernon had full-time residences, an office building, a symposium hall, a dozen conference rooms, a cafeteria, and a gym. Visiting scientists doing approved research on spaceship data would sometimes bunk at the facility. This was arguably so that the research results were extra secure, but in truth it was more because staying there amounted to a nice little vacation in one of the more pleasant parts of the country.
But of course, this was still a telescope, and not a server farm. Telescopes like this one were supposed to be listening to the sky, and since Algie was a top-secret facility, it only followed that it would be trying to identify secret things.
Using a telescope to find things in secret for the government was an idea both as old as telescopes and as silly as anything a government could cook up. One problem was that the planet has an annoying tendency to spin, and the telescope was attached to the planet. The objects in the sky also moved, but this was far less obvious a problem than the issue with the planetary rotation.
Essentially, in the incredibly unlikely event that Algie picked up something important enough to justify the secrecy of the telescope, it couldn’t listen to it non-stop. It would need the help of a telescope on the other side of the world.
That wasn’t even the biggest problem. The sky happened to be huge, and remarkably ecumenical. Project Algernon had no better chance of stumbling across something important than any of the hundreds of non-secret facilities also in existence. Worse, any private citizen with a few acres of land and a few thousand dollars’ worth of equipment could build a functional radio telescope. It wouldn’t be as precise as the bigger ones, but it would work, and it wouldn’t be all that hard to do.
Also, the government could only classify information once it existed, but it couldn’t do anything about how that information was discovered… not until someone found a way to make it against the law to look up.
What tended to happen instead was that the Algie array verified the findings of other facilities and then classified the findings. This sounded sort of dumb too, except it wasn’t really the findings that were being classified, it was the method by which the government scientists working at Project Algernon came about the information.
Astronomers routinely rely upon one another to verify things they may or may not have found in the sky. This was for a lot of reasons, one being the thing about the planet rotating. Another was that what one facility thinks they hear could also be an instrumentation error, and nobody wants to announce they’ve discovered an anomaly in cosmic background radiation when it was actually a blender resonating on a steel counter in the ground floor commissary.
Requests for verification were performed along established, and usually private, channels. If it so happened that the United States government was intercepting these private communications, and the findings in those communications were secretly verified, then the responsible thing to do was to classify the results.
It was likely that a large portion of the scientific community was aware that this was taking place and didn’t care all that much, because no matter what anybody found when listening to the sky, no-one had yet to stumble across something that would have given one country a leg up on another country. The universe was indifferent to borders.
Long after the servers on this base stopped being used as a physical repository for all things relating to the Sorrow Falls spaceship, something happened at Project Algernon that justified a top-secret classification. Nobody was at all sure what that thing was, but they did have the phone number of an expert.
Edgar Somerville was getting used to the idea that he was the guy the government called when weird things happened. He was already the go-to expert on the subject of what exactly happened in Sorrow Falls on the night of The Incident, as well as being the best available resource on the subject of Annie Collins. He was also already on the payroll and had a high security clearance. Even better, just about all of his position papers on the Sorrow Falls spaceship had turned out to be accurate—it was just that the doom he predicted took a lot longer than anyone expected and looked a bit more horror-movie-strange than any analyst could have anticipated.
Basically, it was the kind of résumé that would have made him pretty famous if anyone knew about it. He was kind of glad nobody did.
“You ever been up here before, sir?” The driver asked.
Ed was in the back of an army SUV, which was something that never seemed to change about his job, even when he was traveling overseas. The sameness made him long, irrationally, for a stretch limo.
“I have, yes,” Ed said. “Couple of times. Back before.”
The soldier at the wheel nodded. Ed couldn’t remember his name. Something Polish.
The drive up to Algernon snaked through the kind of forest hikers went missing in. There weren’t a lot of sights to see along the way, either: just trees. This was intentional. The army liked to hide things in places people wouldn’t accidentally stumble upon.
“You were there, weren’t you?” the driver asked. It wasn’t really a question; he knew who he was talking to. Likewise, Ed did
n’t need clarification on where there was.
“I was, yes.”
“Were there… if you don’t mind me asking … I mean, I’ve heard the stories.”
“Zombies?”
“That’s what I heard.”
“We can’t talk about that, corporal.”
“Yes sir, I understand.”
“But yes, there were. Keep it to yourself.”
The driver smiled.
“Yes sir.”
The fact that there really were zombies running around Sorrow Falls on the night of The Incident wasn’t actually classified, it was just that nobody from the government had ever gone on record about it. Someone figured out early on that the best way to handle this aspect of the story was to let it get out and allow people who were naturally skeptical of such a thing take care of casting the necessary doubt on the concept. This was much better than trying to keep the zombies a secret.
Annie got asked the same question—about the zombies—once during her press tour. Her answer was incredibly simple and simultaneously elegant.
Yes, she said, but they all got better.
Ed remembered wondering at the time if the answer came from the P.R. people Annie hired, or if she thought of it herself. It wasn’t really accurate, but he thought maybe everyone accepted that answer because she was sixteen, and she’d just saved the world, and everyone liked that about her.
It was still wrong. Some of the zombies were truly the reanimated dead, and they certainly did not get better. They just went back to being entirely deceased. Likewise, a decent number of the people who started that night in Sorrow Falls alive didn’t make it to morning that way.
But that didn’t fit Annie’s narrative, and the government certainly had no interest in calling attention to it. So: the government didn’t confirm zombies, and nobody asked Annie about it after that one time, and meanwhile everyone from Sorrow Falls had an annual remembrance day in August to honor the people who never woke up.
The dead kept Ed awake at night sometimes, but he was responsible for a couple of them, so that was understandable. He wondered if he was the only one they kept awake.
Then he wondered how Annie did on her philosophy midterm.
The driver got the SUV as far as the front gates before putting the vehicle into park, which was a little earlier than Ed was accustomed to. But, the gate was closed. There was a sentry booth on the inside of the fence, with all manner of scary-looking border-patrol-quality deterrents to prevent anyone from just coasting through on days when the fence gates weren’t closed. Nobody was in the sentry booth, which was a little interesting.
A woman in a bomber jacket stood near the gates, leaning on a Jeep and looking down at her phone. Her name was Melissa Braver, and she was Ed’s Pentagon liaison. Melissa was dressed in baggy civilian clothing, so it was hard to tell that she was regular army and impossible to tell that she looked really great in an evening gown.
Ed happened to know the second thing about her because they used to date, which was a piece of information whoever assigned her to this gig either didn’t know or didn’t care about. Or, they thought it would be funny, which was possible but pretty unlikely. It was generally a mistake to assume anybody in the Pentagon had a sense of humor.
“Captain Braver,” Ed greeted. He hopped out of the back of the SUV. The driver with the Polish name climbed out too and delivered a crisp salute. Melissa returned the salute.
“I’ll take him in from here, corporal,” she said. Her hand went from salute to offered handshake. “Mr. Somerville.”
Ed didn’t get or give salutes, because he wasn’t a ranked member of any military. This tended to confuse a lot of people. The driver, for example, had already saluted him four or five times.
Ed and Melissa shook hands and acted like they’d just met until the SUV left. Then they stood around and looked at the locked fence for a little while.
“So, this is weird, huh?” Ed said.
“You mean Algernon, or me?”
“I meant you. I have to do some research to officially designate whatever happened here as weird.”
“Well,” she said, walking to the combination lock keeping the gates sealed, “it sounds like you’ve got a pretty low hurdle there. What comes after weird?”
“I don’t know. Alarming? Terrifying? Catastrophic?”
She popped the lock.
“I’m gonna get you a thesaurus for Christmas. Come on.”
Just like his aching over-familiarity with the back seats of military SUV’s, Ed had seen a lifetime’s worth of army bases. That was already true prior to The Incident, but it either got twice as bad after or it just seemed that way.
The problem with being the expert on “this sort of thing” was that everyone had a different definition of what “this sort of thing” actually was, and a lot of the people who were wrong about that were important people who had the power to requisition his time.
The whole situation was pretty funny. After the ship left the planet, a significant majority of the world’s population exhaled collectively. Sure, there was a tremendous interest in what happened the night of the ship’s departure, but in big-picture terms, people were pretty relieved. There were parties.
It made Ed think of the Cold War, and what it must have felt like when that was over. Most people didn’t spend every day actively worrying about death by nuclear holocaust, but there was still that vague sense of dread. When the dread went away, everyone celebrated.
The only ones not celebrating after the ship left were attached to the US government. If anything, the people who knew precisely what the spaceship was and was not doing for the entire three years had gotten significantly more paranoid since.
To Ed, because Project Algernon was less a military base than a research facility, he found it a tiny bit more distinctive. It was just five pleasant-looking buildings at the top of a hill, with a pretty great view of a Northern California valley during the day and the kind of night sky that poets tripped over themselves to describe. It still had that army base feel, though, which was somewhere between prison colony and summer camp.
“Where you coming from?” Melissa asked.
“South Carolina.”
“Anything interesting? Or can you not say?”
She was piloting the Jeep down the only paved route to the top of the hill, while they both ignored the slightly disconcerting fact that they were completely alone.
“I can say, because it wasn’t anything. Someone saw a ghost.”
“You’re joking.”
“I really wish I was. This is what I do now, Mel, I’m ghost hunter. Mostly. Sometimes, it’s a vampire. Last month, someone thought there were werewolves.”
“I thought you were an alien catcher. And a babysitter.”
“I’m those things too. Depends on what day it is.”
Technically, Melissa Braver was more of a babysitter these days than Ed was. She was attached to a Pentagon group known informally as Team Babysitter. Their job was keeping one eye on Annie Collins at all times, either themselves or through the joint task force that had the Secret Service running point on Annie’s personal protection. Ed consulted regularly with members of that team, which was how he met Melissa in the first place.
“So do you want to tell me what’s going on around here?” he asked.
“Well, there’s nobody home,” she said.
“I can see that,” he said. The last time Ed was there, he’d spotted four perimeter guards, two joggers and one off-duty soldier working on a tan, all before reaching the main building. It seemed unlikely that the grounds would look this abandoned on a sunny day. “Did they evacuate the base?”
“Not in any official sense, no. It’s supposed to be occupied, so far as the army is concerned. It’s just not.”
“Where’d they all go?” he asked.
She laughed and shook her head.
“Did they really not tell you any of this already?”
“Part of the dea
l. I don’t want to come into any situation with someone else’s idea of what happened. It keeps me from jumping to unsupported conclusions.”
“Because people are stupid?”
“People have biases. I do too, but I can’t control those.”
“But now you’re asking me.”
“Yes, because you aren’t stupid.”
“Thanks.”
“I’ll admit that going in blind isn’t the best system for every situation,” Ed said. “I mean, I could have saved a trip if they told me I was heading to Camp Lejeune because someone thought a Confederate General was haunting the commissary.”
“Seriously, how is that alien-related?”
Everything is, when an alien can be a sentient idea, he thought.
“We’re all still a little jumpy,” he said. “That’s it.”
“Right. Well. As you’ve already observed independently, this place is empty. And I don’t want to pre-bias you with my personal observations, but there’s nobody inside either. I mean, unless there are ghosts in there, I haven’t been looking for them.”
“Of course there aren’t ghosts,” he said. “It’s the middle of the day.”
She laughed.
“Right. Please tell me you’re joking.”
“I’m joking. How long’s it been like this?”
“A week, we think. This kind of isolation, it could be as much as two, but the menu in the caf says otherwise.”
“And where did everyone go?”
“Well gosh, I’m just a simple army grunt, how am I supposed to know?”
“So that’s why I’m here.”
“That’s why you’re here.”
Melissa parked the Jeep in a lot that had seven other cars in it.
“Who else is here?” Ed asked, climbing out.
“Just us.”
“They abandoned the facility on foot?”
Mel shrugged.
“Do you want me to speculate or not?” she asked. “Because I have a lot of theories, and none of them involve an alien.”
The Frequency of Aliens Page 3
