Sleeper Seven

by Mark Howard

  "Yeah between this and your driving I may need it."

  After taking three pills, she folded her arms across her chest like a mummy and lay down on the floor of the van, while Roper climbed back in the captain's seat and set off down the bumpy forest service road.

  ~ 72 ~

  Roper was right about the food; they arrived at 9:30 A.M. to a veritable feast awaiting them. Victor had prepared Belgian waffles with whipped cream and fresh strawberries, with sides of smoked salmon, sausage and scrambled eggs. Before partaking, however, Jess took a long hot shower upstairs. Her bruised arm had turned a lovely shade of greenish-purple, but the swelling had gone down some in the last few hours, and doubling up on the Pamprin kept the pain at bay. She got dressed and enjoyed the wafting smell of fresh coffee for a moment before heading back downstairs.

  At the dining room table, she found Sag and Star already eating, though they looked equally worn out from their own late night adventures. They greeted her with congratulatory, yet delicate, hugs.

  "So I assume Roper told you the whole story?"

  Star reprimanded her. "Yes, and we agree yer a dern fool. You coulda just let me know, we woulda figured something out." Then, softening her tone, "But we've all been young and stupid, I guess." She glanced at Roper. "Some of us are old and still stupid, and it usually works out in the end anyway."

  Victor pulled out a chair for her and they sat down to eat. Jess had several questions, but needed to get some coffee and waffles into her. Priorities.

  "So what happened?" she asked Sag, after downing a few savory mouthfuls. "Were you able to send the fleet-wide kill signal before Star had to skedaddle?"

  "We sure did, and it was close — she had some company come by, so she scooted out of there, but I had already broadcast it."

  "So what do you think happened? Did it affect their fleet at all?"

  "Well we're waiting for Noly and our other contacts inside, but obviously they may be occupied right now — probably tired as hell after being debriefed all night in post-mortem incident meetings with some pissed-off higher-ups."

  Star jumped in. "Yeah, we think probably it just locked down any ships they had out and returned them to their home bases, so that's something, but certainly not what we'd hoped for in terms of a permanent grounding."

  Victor emerged from the kitchen, stirring a bowl of waffle batter while holding a cordless phone to his ear. Passing them by, he walked quickly into the living room. As they all looked at eachother curiously, they heard the click of the old T.V. turning on.

  "Team meeting in the living room," Victor called out.

  A cacophony of chairs scraping the hardwood floor filled the air as they all shuffled into the living room. A local station out of Dubuque was airing a live CNN feed from Wichita, Kansas, where a large crowd had gathered in the middle of a freshly planted bean field. Jess was wondering why the heck they were stomping all over those fresh plantings, when they cut to a news reporter interviewing a man clad in a green John Deere shirt.

  "...and when did you first notice this?"

  "Came out this mornin' to feed the pigs and saw this thang just a settin' there. Tain't moved an inch in the last three hours."

  "And what do you think it is?"

  "I don't know what in the hell it is. We all was a hopin' you would!"

  The screen cut to a wide shot of the field, where just a few hundred feet over the rows of freshly planted bean sprouts sat a pristine Gen III ship, silently suspended as if bolted to the sky.

  ~ 73 ~

  An audible gasp arose from the crowded living room.

  "What the fuck!" Jess shouted, as Sag took off running up the stairs.

  The broadcast then cut to a split-screen of the reporter in the lower left-hand corner, along with the wider shot of the ship over the field. The reporter seemed to be receiving word of something in his earpiece when they cut back to the main studio.

  "Some amazing images out of Kansas, and apparently they are not the only ones — incredibly, another object has now been discovered over downtown Portland, Oregon, we go there live, to our KATU affiliate, now."

  The screen changed to a street-level city view, showing of a gathering of bystanders, along with several policemen waving their arms in the air in an attempt to back the assembled crowd away from the scene. The camera tilted up, revealing one corner of another Gen III ship peeking out from behind an office tower, before an officer covered the camera lens with his hand.

  Victor turned the channel to find yet another live newscast, this one showing an old farmhouse with a third ship poised just fifteen feet over the roof.

  "Jesus, how many of them do they have out at a time? And what happened to them!" Jess remarked.

  "Oh shit, check out dude!" Roper exclaimed, pointing at the screen. A man in a Carhartt jacket and work boots was climbing the shingles of the steep farmhouse roof, and upon reaching the crest, retrieved a long branch-cutting pole passed up to him by another man on the ground. Straddling the roof line, he stood up, and as his hair rose around his head, he slowly extended the pole towards the helpless vessel.

  "He's gonna poke it, the crazy motherfucker!" Roper yelled. The room roared with laughter as the man tapped three times on the bottom of the ship. Raising his fist victoriously, he threw the pole to the ground, then scrambled down to the cheers of the gathered crowd.

  Everyone in the room shouted and high-fived each other, while the man on T.V. did the same with his buddies on the ground, until two burly officers pushed through the crowd and roughly took him into custody.

  The news reporter was nearly struck dumb at the spectacle. "Ahh...apparently we just witnessed a bystander climb onto the roof and literally poke this mysterious airship. I...I'm honestly not sure what to say about this...twenty-two years of reporting, and I never..."

  In the meantime, Sag had snuck back down from upstairs. "So, yeah," he interrupted, as they all turned to look at him. "Uh, that was all me, guys," he added sheepishly.

  "Yeah... So, there was a...bug...in the fleet-wide transmission script I ran last night," he continued. "Seems like it only got the first command through, so none of the ships ever got the second command that Jess' ship got, which apparently is the 'return to base' one. Looks like they just got the 'halt' one." Appearing as if he were about to cry, Jess felt bad for him, until the previously silent room erupted in peals of laughter. The group pulled him onto the couch, violently administering a plethora of high-fives, nouggies, and pats on the back.

  "You couldn't a done it better if ya tried, matey!" Roper roared at him.

  They spent the next hour flipping through T.V. channels, documenting the carnage they had semi-inadvertently unleashed. Four more stranded ships were discovered: one outside of Texarkana, Texas, another near Bolinas, California, a third over the town square of Westboro, Massachusetts, and the final one over a freeway twenty miles north of Miami, Florida.

  "And we thought the big news of the day was going to be the wanton destruction of the cold-war antenna in the woods of northern Wisconsin!" Star remarked, to more laughter.

  Small private aircraft and news helicopters filled the air over each site, until green military choppers (along with some strange unmarked black ones) shooed them away. The coverage of the events, over-dramatically labeled by CNN as 'Invasion: 2015', included more and more talking heads, while local, state, and federal authorities began cordoning off and restricting access to the affected areas on the ground.

  One enterprising news crew in Texarkana was able to take telephoto video of a firetruck hook and ladder crew rescuing what were clearly human military pilots emerging from the bottom hatch of the ship. Someone in Westboro launched a remote control quadcopter which inspected the helpless ship up close from every angle; the video feed was shown live on MSNBC and later published in full HD to YouTube for posterity.

  The news channels had not forgotten the clumsy Wrigley coverup either, and now openly referred to it as such. It was undeniable that the ship in
that incident was very similar to these hijacked vessels, and the standard government disinformation campaign just didn't hold water anymore. That vindication alone did much to lift Jess' spirits.

  Sag had been monitoring the shortwave, and although the Feds had reclaimed the radio transmission at Guantanamo the previous night, they were still redirecting the ships to the original ELF channel, which was now fully out of commission, thanks to Jess. It wasn't until late that afternoon that they had figured out the trick of redirecting the ships to another shortwave frequency, and had begun re-broadcasting the kill commands on that channel in an attempt to push the "return home" command through.

  Even then, they didn't know the 'all FF's' trick Sag had used, and were sending them out serially. Sag imagined the confusion and havoc that must have been happening in those hidden control centers, and relished it all. By that evening, it was clear that even their new kill commands sent serially were not working — all those ships hanging in the air were bricked.

  A camera crew for the paranormal TV show Ghost Adventures, driving down to the Keys to investigate a haunted lighthouse, made a detour to document the Miami ship. Using their FLIR night-vision cameras, they watched from a distance as Huey helicopters with heavy cargo-carrying nets were brought in under cover of darkness. After several attempts, the nets were clumsily hooked to the back two corners of the ship, and it was literally towed away through the air. The entire operation was filmed, and made the ten o'clock news for the west coast feed.

  Jess watched all this play out while lying on the couch under an Afghan blanket, as everyone played nursemaid to her. Declared 'Queen for the Day' with a paper napkin crown, she was, to her delight, presented with a bell to ring whenever she wanted something — which turned out to be quite often.

  The international media reaction to this strange American incident was one of amazement at the advanced state of their technology, along with derision towards 'those silly Americans', who couldn't keep anything under wraps these days, considering Wikileaks, the NSA PRISM project, and now this.

  Politically, the reaction was muted; perhaps because a handful of Euro-block leaders were quietly informed that their own ships had also been disabled. As the event occurred during non-operational daylight hours on their side of the planet, however, they were all safely hangared at the time.

  Back in the U.S., at approximately nine P.M. Central time, a news rumor began circulating that President Obama would be addressing the nation within the following hour. Although the rumor seemed well sourced, the time came and went, and there was no conference. Given the nature of the day's events, no plausible explanation was dismissed, and some pundits proffered that unknown individuals behind the scenes had convinced the President's staff to toe the historical stance — that zero information is better than any information, whether confirmation or denial.

  ~ 74 ~

  The next morning was sunny with clear skies — no more UFO's — and all the talk shows were abuzz with the previous day's activity, showing YouTube clips, interviewing witnesses, and theorizing about what the ships were, and what had happened to them. Stan Fieldman — the man who climbed his roof to touch the Iowa ship — became an Internet sensation, and was officially crowned 'PokeyMan: The PokeMeister General' by Ellen DeGeneres, live on her show.

  It was clear from all the footage that this was U.S. government hardware. Still, the Feds chose to say nothing, for reasons of secrecy, plain old humiliation, or both; and therefore no ire was raised, public or private. It simply became an event, without an explanation.

  UFO experts, now a staple of the cable news channels, puffed their feathers as their belief system — for so many years relegated to the realm of crackpots — was suddenly validated. The gloating was palpable, with many overt 'We told you so's'. Most, however, lost their newfound status within days, as they continued to vociferously promote the idea of alien visitation, which despite the amazing footage available, still had no evidential support.

  In fact, this was the most public UFO event in history — and there was not a single actual extraterrestrial to be seen. This set the cause of the true believers back substantially, as the conventional wisdom — never one to see shades of gray — decided that all UFO's, present and historical, had always been advanced human technology. Ironically, the alien proponents came to be looked down upon even more than before, if that was even possible.

  Over the following days, spotting parties were organized across the country, and they stayed up until the wee hours to see if they could catch the ships on their nightly maneuvers. Night vision equipment became the number one item on Amazon, and the makers had a field day, as the target market expanded from niche paranormal groups and T.V. show producers to one in every five households overnight.

  The watch parties, in addition to being a boon for Starbucks, also resulted in a surprising number of hits: several hundred sightings each night, fully documented on video. Scores of thermal and night-vision recordings were posted online, and with the help of the latest low-light sensitive cellphone cameras, the days of blurry and indistinct images were no more. The world was awash in high-quality footage of UFO's.

  After several days, the adjustment process to this new reality began to shift from simple awe towards the more pragmatic direction Jess was hoping to see emerge. With U.S. unemployment still hovering in the high single digits, calls went out to open up this advanced technology and make it available to American industry, in the hopes of bringing about a revolution in the transport, travel, and manufacturing sectors.

  Investigations into historical black-budget programs were also re-opened with renewed vigor, and it was later determined that, over the course of seventeen years starting in the mid-seventies up until the early nineties, close to two-hundred billion dollars had been siphoned off into black budgets with no accountability or congressional oversight. Although this mystery funding was never top-secret information, the taxpayers seemed to accept it at the time, trusting the government was using the money wisely in defense of the nation.

  The sudden exposure of these advanced craft, which, despite their obvious utility in the theatre of war, had never been seen in the decades of combat operations since they were developed — along with the fact that they continued to be spotted over the U.S. nightly in apparent homeland surveillance operations — infuriated the public. They demanded answers, and for the first time in history, black budget programs were vociferously questioned just as the other, more public military pork-belly boondoggles had been. Massive online petition campaigns forced congressmen to schedule hearings on the issue.

  The first roadblock, however, was finding someone to blame. It seemed that many, if not all, of these black projects had been constructed in such a compartmentalized manner that nobody was clearly in charge. The government employees, contractors, and independent experts that were found and called forth to testify were doggedly questioned as to why this technology, which had clearly been in use for twenty years or more, had not been deployed in any of the wars of the early twenty-first century, or even whether there were any future plans to integrate it into the traditional branches of the armed forces.

  No satisfactory answers were provided, and the stonewalling from the harried underlings was as much a defensive tactic as it was legitimate ignorance. The public, however, met these denials with absolute derision, in utter disbelief that billions of tax dollars could be sucked into a black hole of absolute unaccountability, over a span of decades.

  If the heat on the government from the spending oversight committees was bad, the privacy zealots were worse. All the focus was taken off of the latest smartphone data-leakage scandal, ad-tracking conspiracies, NSA wiretapping, and Google data collection uproars, and directed towards what these ships were doing — and continued to blatantly do — every night, in the middle of the night, over populated areas of the country.

  Were they doing their own data collection? Illegal wire tapping? Wi-Fi signal intercepts? The jurisdiction of the
Senate Judiciary Sub-Committee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law was expanded from oversight of the private sector to include incursions by the government itself, and more hearings were held. These, too, were met with a brick wall of 'I am not privy to that information, sir' and fifth-amendment pleadings, stoking the public — and now congressional — anger even further.

  Star's prediction — that objections based on the nuclear-powered propulsion system would be the most damaging — never came to pass. Without a full understanding of the ships composition, weight, and methods of propulsion, nobody knew there were operational nuclear reactors on board. Some speculated they were nothing more than high-tech blimps, and disinformation in this regard continued to protect the government, at least in this area.

  If the results of the investigations were unsatisfactory, at least there was momentum and a path forward: proposals were floated to whitelist, or at least greylist, all black budget projects dollars going forward. One of the Oversight Committee goals was to track the ship's overflights publicly, publishing the purpose and scope of each mission. Legislation would eventually be introduced on both items, but, at great political cost, vetoed by the President.

  But that was all in the future.

  ~ 75 ~

  For the moment, Jess reveled in the fallout of their combined actions as she recuperated at the farm. Victor made another cake the next day, a triangular chocolate one decorated with 'Disclosure 2: Electric Boogaloo', as other members of the group converged on the farm for a party lasting well into the night.

  Jess, who never felt like a true member of this motley crew, asked for a ride back into Chicago a few days later. She missed Gavin, and Nora, and city life in general. She would find out how exactly her identity and finances had been destroyed, and try to rebuild as best she could.