The Blurred Man

by Bard Constantine

  The Blurred Man

  The Blurred Man

  Midpoint

  The Blurred Man

  A Prometheus Saga Short Story

  by

  Bard Constantine

  The Alvarium Experiment

  Copyright © 2015 by Bard Constantine

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by an electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  Cover Design: Charles A. Cornell

  Cover Imagery Sources: Starry night background by Yuriy Kulik. Vitruvian Man image by James Steidl. Abstract face image by Bruce Rolff. Woman with handgun image by Piotr Marcinski.

  Published by Non Omnis Moriar

  The Prometheus Saga Introduction

  What’s past is prologue …

  —William Shakespeare, the Tempest

  The individual keeps watch on other individuals. Societies keep watch on other societies. Civilizations keep watch on other civilizations. It has always been so. Keeping watch is sometimes benevolent, sometimes malevolent. It is most certainly prudent.

  It is not a trait exclusive to the human species.

  Out of such prudence an advanced intelligence, far across the vastness of space, delivered to Earth a probe 40,000 years ago, to observe and report the progress of the human species. This probe was “born” here fully formed, a human being, engineered from the DNA of Homo sapiens. It possessed our skin, our organs, our skeleton, our muscles.

  And it still lives among us.

  The probe keeps watch.

  The probe is one of us. Almost. It possesses a nuclear quantum computer brain, emitting a low-level electromagnetic field. It manipulates DNA and stem cells, healing itself as needed. It dies, but remains immortal. It enters human societies, adopting any guise, any race, any gender, any age it wishes, following a three-month metamorphosis. It witnesses the events, great and small, good and bad, that shape our destiny.

  The probe keeps watch.

  Everything it sees, hears, feels, experiences, and thinks, it flashes instantaneously across a thousand light-years, in real-time quantum-entangled communication with the intelligence that sent it here.

  The probe keeps watch.

  And sometimes it acts.

  Acknowledgements

  To be a part of a project like this requires a great deal of maneuvering, haggling, and all around hustling to get it accomplished. Special thanks go out to Charles A. Cornell and Ken Pelham for coming up with this groundbreaking idea to take anthology publishing and flip it on its head. And another thanks to Charles for his gorgeous cover work. His enthusiasm and expertise is displayed on every cover of this series and we’re very fortunate to have him put in the time and effort to create such attractive cover and promo work.

  Lastly, thanks to all the members of the Alvarium Experiment. Through trial and error we’ve come to this point, learning along the way what it takes to get a lumbering beast like this to operate. I’ve enjoyed my interactions with all of you, and can only hope to look forward to further collaboration as we look to the future of this project.

  For feral things

  like she and he

  were never meant to dance,

  to be that close, for fallen souls

  aren’t meant to be entranced;

  never meant to magnify each

  dirty word and deed,

  nor see the hungry

  children

  careless gods were

  meant to feed.

  ~Immortal Musings

  The Blurred Man

  I

  The area was a complete disaster. Smoke billowed and smothered the air, casting a shadow across a sky that should have been glowing with morning light. Rubble lay everywhere, the ruins strewn across the landscape more like the remnants of some ancient civilization than a modernized milling facility.

  Agent Dylan Plumm strode across the chaotic landscape, her oversized rubber boots sucking in the thick mud with every step. The boots were loaners from one of the many firefighters that swarmed the scene. Ambulances, police cars and other emergency vehicles were present as well, creating a pulsing lightshow that would have been visible for miles had it not been for the blanket of choking smoke.

  The local force was a small, bewildered group obviously out of their comfort zone in a situation of such destructive magnitude. She imagined the small town of Adamsville, Alabama didn’t see anything remotely like the eruption that destroyed the flour mill. Small wonder they appeared so discomforted. The man in charge was Captain Forrester, who appeared a bit more experienced than the men who worked under him. Dylan studied him briefly, assessing his facial features, build, age, posture and mannerisms.

  Ex-military, more than likely the US Army. Served well, but lacked ambition. Most likely topped out at lieutenant before retiring and entering law enforcement. Modest means, but proud of his accomplishments. Still married to first wife with multiple children and grandchildren. Alabama fan.

  Agent Chen Lee debriefed the Captain, leaving Dylan free to survey the scene. While it would take days or weeks for the survey and investigation teams to come to a conclusion, her eyes saw past the damage. The quantum computer in her brain analyzed the pattern of debris, the totality of the damage, the effect on the surrounding area. She concluded a powerful explosive was purposely triggered from the top of the building, causing enough damage to the core of the structure that it basically imploded on itself. The initial explosion triggered secondary ones on account of the compressed air, dust, and enclosed spaces, furthering an already catastrophic eruption.

  “What do we got, Plumm?”

  She brushed a stray strand of her pulled-back blond hair from her face as Agent Lee approached. Like Dylan, he was dressed in dark slacks and an FBI jacket over his rumpled dress shirt. He wore his customary deadpan expression, scrubbing his hand across his bristly, short-cropped hair.

  She paused from recording the imagery with her tablet computer. “Massive explosion. The entire building is history. Don’t see these very often anymore.”

  “Anyone got a theory on the cause?”

  “Not yet. With dust and enclosed spaces there’s always a risk of explosions in mills like this, though all the modern ones are constructed to reduce that chance as much as possible.”

  She slid some pages over on the tablet, looking at the data projections. “Still, something like an overheated bearing in an elevator leg might ignite the dust and cause an explosion. That could cause a chain reaction, but—”

  “But that wouldn’t bring down the entire building, would it?”

  Dylan shook her head. She briefly considered offering her full analysis, but realized it wouldn’t matter. Agent Lee didn’t think much of working with women, and it showed in his attitude. In their short time working together he proved to be a chauvinistic dinosaur of an agent, cutting off her sentences, claiming credit for her finds and ignoring her every chance he could. He would pretend to listen, then dismiss everything she told him unless it agreed with his own assessment. In view of that, she gave him the response he expected.

  “All estimates indicate negative. Best guess is an explosive was detonated. No evidence to support that yet, but—”

  Lee grunted. “Yeah, well it’s a hell of a mess. How many dead?”

  Dylan continued to scan the intel from the dossier on her tablet. She had no need, but reciting everything from memory only attracted unwanted attention. “Six unaccounted for. There’s a crew tr
ying to salvage any body parts for identification. Not going to be easy, with the exception of one.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You’re going to have to see it.”

  He sighed and followed her. As they picked their way past debris and salvage teams, he slipped and just managed not to embarrass himself. “Dammit! Muddy as hell.”

  Dylan nodded. “The fire department had a time stopping the fire from spreading.”

  “What did they do, drop a few loads by helicopter? This place is saturated.”

  “I noticed. It’s possible the explosion could have ruptured the main water line.” She omitted that only a massive storm could have dropped so much water at once. It was too bizarre for Agent Lee to believe because all weather reports in the area claimed fair skies. She couldn’t properly explain the phenomenon without more data, so she filed it in her mental database as a quandary to examine in full detail later.

  She led Agent Lee to the far end of the collapsed mill where an emergency crew gathered around a corpse laid upon a gurney.

  “One of the day shift supervisors identified him as Guy Mann, employee of six months.”

  Lee snorted. “Guy Mann? Guess that’s better than John Doe. You guys have a cause of death?”

  One of the medics looked up. “Flatline. That’s all I can tell. No sign of stroke or heart failure. All organs seem to be intact. Almost as if his brain just…shut off.”

  Dylan surveyed the body. The man could have blended in anywhere without standing out. In fact, he was the most nondescript person she had ever come across. It actually took concentration to focus on his perfectly average features, as if his face was purposefully meant to be dismissed. His clothes were scorched and torn in a few places. He lay as though asleep; his lips slightly curved in a peaceful smile.

  Lee scratched his head. “Ok, what’s so strange about a dead guy?”

  Dylan gave him a sideways glance. “Don’t you find it strange that the body is almost completely unharmed? Only a few lacerations and bruises. There’s hardly a scorch mark even though he was found in the middle of this wreckage.”

  Lee shrugged. “Stranger things have happened.”

  Another medic spoke up. “He was covered in some black substance when we found him. We thought he was severely burned. But it was some type of…covering. Appeared organic. It deteriorated as soon as we peeled it off of him. We just managed to get a few samples for the lab before the wind blew it all away.”

  “Some kind of fireproof shield, maybe,” Lee said. “Maybe he was responsible for the explosion.”

  “It will be hard to prove that now,” Dylan said. “What do you want to do?”

  Lee gestured indifferently. “Process him. Maybe an autopsy will give us a few answers. Check if he had any psych records, mental illnesses. Known associates. Find out what kind of person he was.”

  He turned away as the medics zipped up the body bag. An emergency worker ran their direction, gesturing frantically. “Over here! We have someone!”

  They saw a group of emergency workers supporting a tall blond man. He was smothered in soot and bruises. A bloody bandage covered one of his shoulders.

  Agent Lee shared a smile with Dylan. “I’ll be damned.” The entire group scrambled toward the man, leaving the gurney unattended.

  ***

  “So can you please explain how a dead body just…vanishes?”

  Philip Dirk drummed his thick fingers on the weathered surface of his oak desk. Like the desk, the Field Director had seen better days. The years of running ops, public relation spins, and bureaucratic wrangling had paid off with interest in premature scowl lines, heavily bagged eyelids, and a graying hairline in the process of rapid retreat.

  Dylan created the façade of nervousness by shifting uncomfortably in her chair. Most people approached a summons from the Director like an invitation to their own funeral, so she felt it only appropriate to feign the proper sense of anxiety. Not that it mattered. Having hacked the FBI system long ago, she had downloaded all of their personnel files into her mental data banks, including medical records. Instantaneous recall of Dirk’s last physical exam revealed a near-certain likelihood for a major heart attack or stroke, whichever caught him first. His intake of medication for high blood pressure and related maladies didn’t seem to buffer the onslaught of stress from upper management demands, budget slashes, personnel disasters, and a rather aggressive smoking habit.

  “A dead body belonging to the only real suspect behind this explosion, by the way,” he continued. “A dead body under the watch of the FBI, not to mention the local police force and emergency crews. Yet somehow this ‘Guy Mann’ pulls a resurrection act and nobody notices? How is that possible, Agent Plumm?”

  Dylan hesitated for a moment. “I thought Agent Lee was the lead on this case, sir. Shouldn’t he be debriefing you?”

  Dirk frowned and sat back in his chair. His eyes shifted away as the words reluctantly dragged out. “Agent Lee has been taken off the case.”

  “Taken off the case? Why?”

  “Incompetence.” Dirk’s fingers tapped a staccato across his desk again. Itching for a cigarette, Dylan figured. The Director went through an average of a pack and a half a day. Unless it was a bad day, when he’d smoke until he ran out.

  “Agent Lee can be called many things,” she said. “Incompetent isn’t one of them.”

  Dirk glared at her. “What do you want, the official report?” He picked up the tablet on his desk. “Says here that his ‘mental state no longer warrants field work. Intensive psychiatric evaluation recommended.’ You ask me what that means, I say incompetent. Now that we got that out the way, why don’t we get back to the original topic: the dead body of a main suspect disappearing into thin air?”

  “I have nothing to tell you that’s not in my report, sir. We left the body for the forensics crew to handle. Standard procedure. Our main focus was on the lone survivor, Michael McDaniel.” Her memory core automatically pulled the dossier: The tall, blond man they recovered at the scene was currently in an agency psychiatric ward in San Francisco, recovering from severe mental and emotional trauma.

  Dirk’s mouth twisted. “Another loony toon. Know what he spouts when he’s not heavily medicated?”

  “I’ve seen the videos, sir.”

  Dirk went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “Keeps going on and on about faceless monsters. Giant spiders and rats. Doorways to another dimension. Your average horror movie feature. I swear, the shit these guys pull to get a crazy card. This case will never make it to court, mark my words. It’ll just go on and on…”

  Dylan nodded as thousands of possibilities for the conversation’s outcome processed through her neural net. Less than a second later she chose the appropriate query to bring the discussion to an end. “What do you want me to do, sir?”

  Dirk’s attention refocused. “Bodies don’t just disappear, Agent Plumm. My best guess is Mr. Mann took some kind of sedative cocktail which put him in a temporary coma state. Once it wore off he slipped away with none the wiser. I’d say that makes him the main suspect in this bombing. You find him and bring him in.”

  “That might take some time, sir.”

  “It’s your case now, Agent Plumm. It doesn’t close until you get some results. The top brass are breathing down my neck on this one. Do what you have to do to get it done.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Oh, and one more thing.” He flicked the tablet screen over to a file of case photos. “Try to keep your hands from shaking when you take pictures, Agent Plumm. Every shot of Guy Mann’s face is blurred.”

  Dylan hesitated only for a moment before delivering the appropriate response. “Yes, sir. I’ll try, sir.”

  Six

  Months

  Later

  The case went nowhere.

  An inexplicable outbreak of insanity had completely sidetracked her original investigation. It occurred in the surrounding vicinity of the mill explosion, and had the entire area
in a panic. Mass suicides and bizarre behavior had become the norm in the small radius of neighboring homes. Apparently even Agent Lee had been affected. He had taken his life shortly after Dylan’s meeting with Director Dirk.

  Even more unusual was the complete information blackout as the situation was yanked from the FBI and given to a newly formed agency called the Aberrant Investigation Team, or AIT for short. Dirk had been closemouthed about the deal, telling her to focus her attention on locating the ghost named Guy Mann. As if there was any trail left to follow. But Dylan kept her opinions to herself, if only because it left her with the solidarity she preferred. With no official interest in the case, she was free to pursue her own investigation.

  In the privacy of her apartment, Dylan glanced at the mill explosion case photos once again. Not that it changed anything. Guy’s face was obviously hazy, despite knowing every shot she took was strikingly focused. His face was the only obscured part of any of the photos. That meant only one thing: the Blurred Man was real.

  Dylan knew the urban legend. Bits and pieces were readily available on the internet, touted by fly-by-night bloggers with less than credible sources. A CIA case file was reported to exist on the subject, but if so it was buried somewhere in the same vault with Area 57 data. But like Bigfoot and Elvis, the sightings never truly went away.

  “Chip, pull up all relevant data on the Blurred Man.”

  Her palm-sized, synthetic assistant whirred from its position on her desk. “The Blurred Man. Chasing ghosts in the night, are we? Very well.” The pyramid-shaped automaton emitted a holographic screen flooded with scrolling data from its apex. Dylan’s sparsely furnished studio apartment flooded with light as statistics and pictures flickered, absorbed by her optic receptors and processed by her quantum core at inhuman speed. Seconds later she digested all that was available on both public and private online databases.