Post: The First Byron Tibor Thriller

by Sean Black

  I headed for one of the trees and sat down in its shade. My foot still stung from the spike that had pierced the leather. I pulled off my boots and massaged my feet. As I was putting them back on, I heard the buzz of a drone flying overhead.

  Slowly, I got up, flattening my back against the short trunk, my head running into thorny branches. Glancing up, I caught a glimmer of white in the bright blue sky as the drone worked round in a loop.

  From the brief glimpse I had just had, and its flight pattern, it was almost certainly a reconnaissance and surveillance UAV. If it had thermal imaging or another enhanced capability, I was toast. All I could do was sit tight. Drones could stay in the air a long time. If it moved away the operator, who was no doubt sitting safely back in the States, sipping an icy Diet Coke, had missed me. If it stayed, I was heading back to camp with a lot of explaining to do. What was it Masori had said to me? Everyone has a story. Mine would have to be a good one or I was looking at a world of pain.

  The buzzing was fainter. I looked up through the jagged bone-dry branches and saw the drone a mile out from my position, circling in an ever-widening loop.

  The tips of my fingers felt sticky. I closed my eyes, not wanting to look. I was afraid that the visions I’d had in the truck were returning, that I would open my eyes and see blood.

  Not to look was almost worse. It amounted to an admission that I could no longer trust my own mind. I willed my eyes open, and raised a sticky hand.

  There was momentary relief as I saw that the stickiness wasn’t blood but a gooey clear sap. As the drone circled, I must have dug my fingernails into the tree bark. I brought it up to my nose and inhaled. A juniper tree. I’d seen them before on the approach to the mountains but not on the flat desert plains. As I looked at the mountains in the distance, I started to see more of them. They were dotted everywhere, along with sagebrush and thick balls of tumbleweed.

  I dug out my water bottle and took a couple of long draws. Dehydration, the mind playing tricks. The buzz of the drone had died completely. I was alone again. The sun shifted ever upwards. I pulled down the sleeves of my jacket so that my arms were covered. I closed my eyes and drifted off to sleep.

  I woke to Sasha standing over me. She stared at me with soft brown eyes. She was smiling. The juniper trees had multiplied since I had closed my eyes. They were all around me, packed so densely that they almost blotted out the mountains.

  My mouth felt dry. I pulled out my water bottle. It was close to empty. I offered what little there was to Sasha. She took it from me, twisted off the cap, and emptied the dregs into her mouth. The water spilled red from the corners of her lips. She doubled over, clutching her stomach. The bottle fell to the ground. Blood arced in a torrent from her mouth. It pooled at my feet.

  Then she was gone. There was no blood. The landscape was the same, a scattering of junipers and sagebrush with the mountains in the distance. I blinked and dug out the water bottle. It was half full. Lips cracked and gluey, I took a drink and found the sun. A wind had picked up. I could hear birdsong. That was it. I was alone. In a few hours it would be dark, and I could strike out for the mountains. My stomach rumbled, and I needed to pee. I stepped to the other side of the tree. My piss was closer to amber than yellow as the sunlight sparkled against it. I finished up and sat down on the other side, waiting for sunset.

  I guided my mind away from Sasha. She was the past, I told myself. The desert was my present. One last push. One last push to the mountains.

  I decided that when I reached the mountains I would keep moving. There was more vegetation, more contours in the land to conceal me. More than that, walking banished the horrors.

  I remembered speaking to someone, before my talks with Muir back at the camp, about seeing things that weren’t there. I wasn’t sure who it had been or when they had spoken. All I could remember was the conversation or, more precisely, their side of it. They had told me that once PTSD or combat fatigue, or whatever tag you wanted to put on what people suffered from once they had seen too much, was present, it was often accompanied by hallucinations and flashbacks that appeared wholly real. They worked the same neural pathways as if the event was happening right in front of you. I would go see someone if I had to. Whatever it took, I would do it, but it would have to be on my terms, with a person I could trust, and I wasn’t going to start popping pills or sign up as a government lab rat.

  I covered the remainder of the ground in good time. At one point, I must have skirted close to a road because I saw headlights. I ducked behind a bushy juniper and waited until it passed, then tacked away from the road.

  As the ground started to rise, another dog howled in the distance. I could pick out the outline of a stone compound. The sound cut through me and I altered course again, Gerber in hand, ready if the dog picked up my scent. Dogs here were like the insurgents, tough, mean motherfuckers who’d happily rip you limb from limb just because you were on their ground. I had seen US troops, guys who probably had a much-loved canine at home, shoot them.

  The land grew rocky. I began to climb, my thighs and calves aching as I pushed on. The moon had disappeared behind a stack of clouds. The weather was changing — fast. There was a rumble of thunder in the distance followed by a flash that left my hands and feet tingling. I had moved down into a narrow canyon, hoping it was a pass that would save me having to climb.

  Seconds later the rain swept in. The drops were like bullets, lashing over the bone-dry ground in sheets. Almost immediately I was soaked to the skin. I tilted my head back and stuck out my tongue. The rain felt good but water was already beginning to channel into the pass from higher ground.

  Unclear of how long the canyon ran for, and with no way of knowing how I would be able to climb out without gear if it dead-ended, I doubled back. My boots slopped through the mud, and I had to take a knee as rocks gave way above me. Hair plastered to my face, I pressed on. The rain was hitting me so hard that it hurt. It helped me focus. I scrambled away from the sloping mouth of the canyon. Looking back, I saw that if I’d stayed I would have been waist deep in water by now.

  Skirting round to the west, I climbed toward a narrow ridge line. The rain was shifting ground from under me, ripping out bushes and exposing tree roots. Thunder boomed and lightning forked. The ground crackled with the burst of electricity, and I was thrown backwards. I put out my hands in time to break the fall, got back to my feet and pressed on.

  The ridge line was up ahead, blocked by a vertical rock face. To the east was a path that climbed upwards. I would take that, if it hadn’t been washed out by the time I got there.

  It was a short distance but it took me some time to cover the ground. I followed the path up toward the ridge. At one point, almost blinded by rain, I lost my footing at the very edge of a sheer drop. I grabbed for a tree branch. It held as my fingers closed around it, and I hauled myself up.

  The path was being fractured by the force of the storm. I hunkered down on my hands and knees and begin to climb straight up. My hands searched for gaps in the rock.

  With one final push I breached the ridge line and collapsed face down, my face painted a watery red thrown up from the rocks. I had made it.

  A final clap of thunder sounded as I stared in disbelief at the city spread out before me. No. It wasn’t possible. I blinked through the rain, certain that my mind was playing another trick on me. This time, though, I couldn’t clear away what I was seeing. I tried closing my eyes and opening them again, willing my mind back to reality. It was no use.

  Beneath me lay the original mirage, America’s great city of the imagination, a blazing forest of light that rose from the desert – Las Vegas. I could pick out not just the Strip, but the signs on individual casinos and hotels. My mind might have been playing tricks, but I was sure there was nothing wrong with my eyesight.

  There was only one thing for it. I would deal with this in the same way I had dealt with everything else that troubled or scared me. I would confront it. I got to my feet and set off
down the slope, heading for the burning neon bubble as the storm folded its arms around me.

  ‘How many people here believe in free will? Okay, that’s going to change.’

  Robert Sapolsky, professor of neurology and neurological sciences at Stanford University

  TWENTY-ONE

  Graves

  Harry Graves pulled up to the guardhouse at the entrance to the research facility seventy miles north of Las Vegas. Hot desert air rushed in as he lowered the driver’s window to speak to one of the two private security contractors manning the gate. The procedure was so engrained in him that he barely gave it a second thought. As they chatted, the other guard checked the trunk. A camera mounted atop the guardhouse scanned the vehicle. A separate camera scanned Graves’s face, lingering over his retina. That was the nature of security at the perimeter of the facility – high-tech and low key. The guards themselves were affable. They were there to run the system. Any breach was dealt with by others but very few had taken place – until a few days ago. Usually, the most they had to contend with was the occasional UFO spotter tracking back this way from the nearby Area 51. The overly persistent were dealt with by the local county sheriff’s department and sent politely on their way.

  It was a full mile before you reached the actual facility. Barring the guards armed with M-4s at the second checkpoint, and its remote location, the facility could have doubled as a college campus or the headquarters of a successful internet company in Silicon Valley. Four single-story white buildings, each with a footprint of forty thousand square feet, were laid out on a diamond pattern. Tucked away in the middle of the diamond, and obscured from sight by the four buildings, was the medical center.

  Graves pulled into a parking space in front of the first building, grabbed his briefcase and headed inside. He signed in at the reception desk, passed another facial recognition and retinal scanner and headed for Muir’s office.

  Muir looked up as Graves walked in and slumped into a chair opposite. Lured away from his glittering academic career to run the program, he had been adept at energizing the team they’d assembled but he’d proved a poor administrator.

  Graves dipped into his jacket pocket for his packet of Marlboros. He pulled one out and stuck it in his mouth while he rummaged for his lighter. The cigarette drew a reproachful stare from Muir.

  ‘There’s no smoking allowed in here, Harry,’ Muir said.

  ‘There’s not?’ he said, taking another drag. ‘You think there’s hope for me, Doc?’ he asked Muir. ‘I mean, I’m closing in on sixty here.’

  Muir smiled across the table at him. ‘You chain-smoke. You drink heavily. Your diet is, quite frankly …’

  ‘Disgusting?’ he offered.

  ‘I was going to say appalling, but disgusting will do. And, yes, I’m sure that even in your condition, at this advanced state, and with your major organs in such a state of probable disrepair, we could find some way of prolonging your conscious life.’

  Graves sighed. ‘Scoop out my grey matter, stick it in a jar, hook me up to a computer. I bet you could,’ he said. What a depressing thought. Eternal life. Hundreds of years more of this shit No, thanks. ‘Think I’d rather just go out like Jimmy,’ he said, finally. ‘Y’know, suck on some metal.’ Across the table, Muir stiffened at the mention of Lewis. Graves open-palmed an apology. ‘I’m sorry, that was tactless.’

  ‘Yes, it was,’ said Muir.

  This was the part of Muir’s character that had come to worry Graves. He’d thought that a scientist, and especially one as driven as Muir appeared to be, would have been more capable of divorcing himself from the work. But in the last few months, ever since the Lewis incident, and then Byron, he’d been more like some over-sentimental animal-shelter volunteer. What a mess. Now they were almost a year behind and DARPA was seriously considering cutting the funding. It had taken all of Graves’s political acumen to stop them pulling the rug out from under them entirely, while he worked on securing them some grey-funding, private money from investors who would benefit from whatever the project threw up.

  DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, was the largest single-entity funder of scientific research in the world, with an annual budget of around $3.2 billion. But while it sounded like a lot, and it was, the money was spread over one hell of a large surface area. If you or someone else could imagine it, then DARPA-funded scientists were working on it. Originally established in 1958 as a response to the Soviet threat, DARPA was to the Pentagon what Silicon Valley was to the rest of the country. From acid and mind-control techniques in the sixties to computing in the seventies, robotics in the eighties, and all manner of nuclear, biological and chemical warfare research throughout its life, DARPA was a decentralized smorgasbord of scientific endeavor with reach beyond military facilities into just about every top college campus. But, after exhausting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and with federal spending coming under more and more public scrutiny, they had to find a new way of doing things, both in the area of operations and outside it. That made the post-sapiens soldier program vital. The US couldn’t give up on the Middle East but neither could it keep throwing bodies at it, or bomb anyone into submission. You still needed boots on the ground, but boots that were capable of doing a lot more. And that was where the PSSP came in: it was brilliant in its sheer simplicity.

  And Graves’s place in the grand scheme of things? He wasn’t a scientist, that was for sure, and he continually had to ask the geekier members of the brains trust he dealt with to explain things in words of no more than four syllables so that he could explain it to the politicians and generals and keep the money flowing. Graves’s great strength was that he had realized early in his career what he was good at and where he was weak. He was a fixer, someone who could navigate the myriad interests ranged across the CIA, the Pentagon and Congress, all the way up to the White House and the President herself. She had taken a surprisingly close interest in the project from its very earliest stages when Muir had been developing the new imaging technology that had opened the whole thing up.

  ‘I’m sorry about what happened with Lewis,’ he said finally.

  Muir met his gaze.

  ‘I mean it,’ Graves went on. ‘It was a damn shame. But maybe, y’know, with the stuff he had in that package it worked out for the best.’

  ‘Do you think anyone would have believed him?’ Muir asked.

  ‘Some might have. People buy into all sorts of things these days,’ he said, choosing his words with care. ‘New World Order, UFOs, how 9/11 was a conspiracy because the CIA planted explosives under the Twin Towers, and all kinds of other stuff that may or may not be true, and that, ultimately, regular people don’t give a shit about. As long as they can pay their mortgage, run two cars and afford a vacation, no one cares, and why would they? If we’d let Lewis tell someone his story, maybe that wouldn’t have been a problem. But if he’d run into someone who’d worked out what he was? That would have been a major issue.’

  Across the table from him, Muir bristled. ‘What he was?’

  ‘Okay, who he was. That better for you?’ He let a cylindrical turd of ash drop from his cigarette onto the floor. ‘No matter. He’s gone.’

  ‘And what about Byron?’ Muir said.

  Graves shrugged. ‘No sign of him. Guy’s a ghost. Now, why don’t you and I take a walk? Show me where it all happened.’

  ‘I thought you’d have security do that?’

  Graves threw down his cigarette butt and ground it under his shoe. ‘I’ve read the report, watched all the footage, talked to people. But you were closer to him than anyone here. I’d like you to take me through what happened exactly.’

  TWENTY-TWO

  They left the office and hung a left, heading toward the medical center. Researchers and scientists pecked at keyboards or hunched over workbenches. In comparison to previous visits, the atmosphere was somber. Graves was hardly surprised after what had happened. These were people who weren’t used to life at the sharp end. Th
ey developed tools for government and the military; they didn’t use them.

  ‘As you know, we’d already done some troubleshooting on the implant you retrieved from Lewis and updated it,’ said Muir.

  ‘You figure out the problem?’ Graves asked him.

  Muir stopped dead. ‘What do you see, Mr Graves?’ he asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s a simple question.’

  Graves rocked back and forth on his heels and glanced around. ‘I see a white corridor. I see doors either side. I see you standing next to me asking me some dumbass question.’

  ‘That’s not what Lewis would have seen. He was suffering from a disconnect between what we accept as reality and what he was experiencing.’

  ‘Flashbacks?’

  ‘After a fashion, but that term doesn’t really capture what some of these men, not just the ones in the program, experience. Sometimes what they dredge up can become more vivid, more real to them than everything else.’

  ‘Either of them tell you about this?’ Graves asked.

  Muir shook his head. ‘Nope. That was what concerned me more than anything, especially with Byron. He’d made such a great subject because he was so open with us.’

  Graves chewed it over. ‘So how’d you know?’

  ‘The fMRI scans showed some inconsistencies between what he was telling us and what may have been going on with him.’

  ‘He was lying?’

  They came to a sallyport manned by two guards. Both men looked up at the retinal scanners. The door clicked open. Graves pushed through. Muir waited until they were well clear of the sallyport before answering.

  ‘No, he wasn’t lying. Not in the way that it’s commonly understood, as a deliberate untruth.’