Second Contact, page 4
part #2 of Not Alone Series
A new kind of silence circled in the basement until Clark broke it by sharing a sentiment he didn’t like but couldn’t avoid: “Dan, I’m hearing you out, okay? But all I’m hearing is the kind of stuff that if someone said it in public, they’d be locked up in a padded cell.”
“The truth doesn’t care what people think,” Dan retorted. “I’ve been inside a spaceship. I’ve spoken to aliens. You really think this is crazier than that?”
Clark wiped his brow uncomfortably. “Don’t take this the wrong way, man, but I think you should maybe start taking those pills again.”
Dan said nothing for several seconds, then let out a slow and deliberate chuckle. “How could I possibly take that the wrong way?” he said, in a very sharp tone wholly at odds with his forced laughter.
“Have you forgotten that the whole thing was a hoax?” Clark asked, minding his volume out of habit more than necessity but sounding as exasperated as a quiet man could. “You’re talking about what was on the first and second plaques? Walker and Kloster made those things in Argentina and dumped them in the sea! How in the ever-loving fuck can any of that mean anything? It was fake! All of it was fake. F A K E…. fake!”
“Clark…” Emma whispered under her breath, touching his shoulder.
“It’s okay,” Dan said. He sat calmly in his chair despite the barrage, looking straight into Clark’s eyes. “Let it out. Better out than in.”
Dan’s calmness disarmed Clark and impressed Emma. He had been impressing her a lot lately, always dressing well and keeping his hair smart; and more generally, whenever she saw him, he always seemed to be far more on top of everything than he had been a year earlier when they first met. He wore the maturity well.
“But if you’re finished…” Dan said. He waited for Clark to react and was satisfied when a nod eventually came. “Good. Because it seems like there’s a disconnect here about what’s real and what’s not. I’ll tell you what I mean if you feel like you can listen without talking. Can you do that?”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m an idiot,” Clark said.
“Then stop acting like one!”
“I’m listening,” Emma chimed in. “And so is Clark. Tell us exactly what you mean. No shortcuts.”
So for the next few minutes, Dan did just that.
C minus 94
Port-aux-Francais Research Station
La Grande Terre, Kerguelen Islands
“You can’t do this,” Billy Kendrick protested, fighting to free his arms as two burly GSC Security Corps officers held him against a wall while several more escorted his frightened tour group outside to be taken back to their waiting ship.
“This is a French island and I’m an American citizen,” Billy yelled. “Your made-up flag has no authority here and your stupid uniforms have no authority over me!”
Half-eaten breakfasts lay around the room, along with the many jackets and backpacks which some less aggressive members of the island’s multilingual GSC contingent had promised to bring to the ship once more pressing matters were dealt with.
Billy felt annoyance more than fear, knowing that these people truly did have no legal authority to do what they were doing. But with two large men bearing over him, and with his disdain for their employer anything but secret, there was a natural element of unease.
“You’re going to hear from my lawyers about this,” he said, his voice lacking verve after several previous failures to elicit any kind of response.
One of the officers then roughly forced his hand into Billy’s pocket, pulling out a wallet and handing it to his colleague.
“Any recording equipment?” the man asked, a strong but unplaceable accent in his gruff voice.
“What do you mean?” Billy replied, hoping to draw a longer answer which would give him more to go on.
Instead, the men glanced at each other before pushing Billy’s stomach into the wall and forcefully commencing a thorough search of his entire person.
When their search came up empty handed, one of them spun Billy around and pointed to a chair.
With fear having long since overtaken annoyance, Billy followed the officer’s silent order. He sat in the chair as the men stared at him and conversed quietly with their hands covering their mouths.
No answer would have come, so Billy kept the next question to himself:
What the hell is going on?
C minus 93
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
Given the length of time that had passed without any of them talking about it, and since Dan wanted to make sure that Emma and Clark were as fresh on the details as he was, he began with an explicit rundown of the nature of Richard Walker’s gut-wrenching hoax; a hoax which had been so internally consistent and so carefully woven around real and verifiable events that no one had questioned it, even a full year after Disclosure Day. This was in no small part down to the way the lie had been presented, dressed up as a secret with Walker expertly leaving a trail of breadcrumbs that made it look like he had been caught red-handed.
The whole world had read the details of the supposed find in Lake Toplitz, which Hans Kloster’s letter had meticulously spelled out. The whole world was likewise familiar with the sequence of events which led to the discovery of two supposedly alien plaques off the coast of Argentina, whose vivid engravings were now as cross-culturally familiar as the Mona Lisa. There was still uncertainty as to the meaning of the 280-year timescale established on one of the plaques through basic algebra and astronomical representations, but the initially acute public fears over the meaning of a representation of Earth dissected by a crosshairs-like symbol had long since faded thanks to a more recent discovery.
As Dan went to great pains to make absolutely clear to Emma and Clark, Walker’s hoax ended there. What came next, while indelibly tied to the hoax, was as true as true could be.
The trio’s strength and sanity had been pushed to breaking point on the fateful night when the lines became blurred — on the fateful night when Richard Walker’s guilt-ridden assistant turned up at the McCarthys’ home to confess that Walker had used Dan as a pawn to convince the world that aliens existed, ostensibly in a desperate effort to halt China’s then-imminent plans for a permanent lunar colony and a Martian research base.
Without the irrefutable evidence they were given, they would never have believed it. But with photographs of Kloster creating the supposedly alien sphere and plaques, with alternative versions of his letter, and with two blank plaques the hoaxers had retained in case of emergency, Dan, Emma and Clark, who had all worked tirelessly to expose what they thought was a genuine government cover-up, had no choice but to accept the horrible truth: they had bought a lie and sold it to the world.
Utterly broken, Dan had told Emma and Clark that there was no way he could keep it quiet. They had seen the pain in his eyes and they had known that he meant it. The future looked impossibly bleak.
But then came Lolo.
Dan perked up during his recap when he reached the part about the day he was called to a cornfield in which he received a subconscious instruction to travel to a location which meant nothing to any of them: a relatively nondescript spot in the wilderness of Lolo National Forest some thousand miles away.
“You both thought I was crazy then, too,” he said, throwing in a rare side-comment amid his focused recap.
At Lolo, both Dan and Emma were invited into a bona fide alien spacecraft where they came face-to-face with two humanoid extraterrestrials. Via a cable connected to his neck at one end and an alien’s hand at the other, Dan learned that the aliens — the Messengers — sought to maintain harmony through what they consistently referred to as minimal necessary intervention.
The Messengers admitted having interfered to curtail the launch of DS-1, a GSC-administered defensive space station which would have ultimately been armed with nuclear weaponry. DS-1 only existed because of the hysteria whipped up by Walker’s hoax, so Dan had no problem in accepting the justification for this intervention. He also learned that Richard Walker had been briefly abducted and advised in no uncertain terms that any attempts to destabilise the world by gloatingly admitting to his incredible hoax would draw a second and final personal intervention.
“This is the heart of it,” Dan said. “The Messengers went to serious lengths to do what they had to do in a way that was consistent with the narrative of the hoax, but these aliens are real. It doesn’t matter that the aliens in Walker and Kloster’s story were totally made up, because these aliens aren’t. You know that lying doesn’t come easily to me, but this isn’t a lie. Okay, a hoax got the ball rolling… but the Messengers are real. They deliberately intervened in a way that didn’t expose the hoax, and that’s the only reason I can live with this secret.
“But our secret isn’t that everything was a hoax,” he went on, “it’s that everything started with a hoax. They wouldn’t have had to intervene if the hoax hadn’t led to DS-1, but everything since then is legit. And remember the main part: they actively decided to engrave the third plaque in a style that matched the other two. That’s the most important thing of all, because they’ve now shown that they’re willing to use the communication symbols and methods that Walker and Kloster established first. To put it as simply as I can: the Messengers are willing to speak to us in the language of those first two plaques, just like they’re willing to use Kerguelen as an important site. They want to communicate with us again, but they want to do it without exposing the hoax.”
As Dan intimated, when the third plaque had been discovered in a Salzburg storage locker the day after Dan and Emma conversed with the Messengers, the plaque’s location and the identity of its lucky finder had made perfect sense within the context of all that went before. The third plaque — created by Walker and Kloster, but truly engraved by intelligent extraterrestrials — provided convincing context for the first two, and it was a context which explicitly quashed all fears of hostility.
“The lie came true,” Dan said. “I know it was a lot easier when everything was black and white and all we were trying to do was expose what we thought was a cover-up, but this is the situation we’re in. I don’t want to get too caught up in terminology, but I can’t just sit here and listen to you tell me that it was all a hoax. Because these aliens are as real as the nose on your face, and they’re coming back.”
Clark nodded slowly. “I obviously know they’re real, man. Fair enough, I didn’t get into their craft, but I was at Lolo, too. I know the message on the third plaque was engraved by real aliens and that even though it wasn’t part of the hoax, it was inspired by the hoax. What I don’t get is why you think they would do something like this at Kerguelen.”
“There’s something they need to tell us,” Dan said. “We know their MO: minimal necessary intervention. They don’t care about human constructs like truth and lies, and I can’t imagine they give much of a shit about our stupid politics. We don’t know if minimal necessary intervention is part of an unbreakable moral code, an edict, or whatever else… all we know is that they live by it. Planting a third plaque was the least invasive way to calm the shit-storm caused by Walker’s lies and it was the least invasive way to make sure we wouldn’t feel like we had to try to launch another nuclear-armed space station after DS-1 failed. That’s why they planted it. This bolide at Kerguelen was so public and so visible that it can only mean they want to get everyone’s attention, and quickly.”
Clark looked at Emma. “Do you get what he’s saying?”
“There’s not all that much to get,” she said. “I was face-to-face with them just like Dan was, and it’s definitely true that they went out of their way to stop the DS-1 launch without revealing themselves. And it’s also definitely true that after Lolo, they went out of their way to calm everything down without destroying everyone’s sense of reality. That’s a word Dan didn’t use, but it’s an important one. This whole narrative has been the basis of everyone’s reality for the past year. When one person finds out that their entire concept of reality is built on a lie, that’s a very difficult thing to take. But when a whole planet finds out…”
Dan leaned back. “So you’re both finally coming round to the reality that this wasn’t random chance, it wasn’t a false flag, and it wasn’t a PR stunt? You’re coming round to the reality that they really are telling me something?”
“It looked to me like they were trying to tell everyone something,” Clark said. “An explosion over Kerguelen isn’t exactly subtle.”
“Emma?” Dan asked.
“I’ve got one question,” she said. “You said that if the Messengers do something that hints at other locations, you’ll know where to look. Yeah?”
Dan shrugged. “Yeah.”
Emma held his eyes. “Look for what?”
Dan rose to his feet, stepped behind the desk and pressed his fingertips against the wall. It parted at the centre to reveal itself as a false wall, and in doing so it exposed a room-length magnetic whiteboard which was overflowing with scribbled notes, rough drawings, and paper printouts.
As Emma and Clark looked up at it all in stunned silence, Emma’s hand covering her mouth and Clark’s eyes darting around uneasily, Dan sat back down beside them.
“I knew something like the Kerguelen bolide was going to happen eventually,” he said, drawing a line in the air from one side of the wall’s annotated workspace to the other. “That’s why I’m ready.”
C minus 92
Drive-in
Birchwood, Colorado
Henry McCarthy passed under a giant arched “DRIVE-IN” sign as he neared the entrance of New Kergrillin’ Bar & Grill.
The old drive-in lot, which had been officially rechristened Birchwood Plaza following its ascent to global renown as a popular location for news reports and grand speeches in the aftermath of Dan McCarthy’s alien exposé, had since been renamed ‘Birchwood Drive-in’ with minimal fanfare.
Locals had always known it simply as ‘the drive-in’ while out-of-towners who came to visit the famous site knew it as ‘the Birchwood drive-in’; and Phil Norris, a McCarthy family friend who purchased the empty lot for next to nothing many years earlier, ultimately accepted Emma’s advice that it was time to stop fighting the tide and embrace a full rebrand.
Given the evening’s events, Henry had a feeling that Phil would be glad he hadn’t also changed the name of New Kergrillin’, a play on the common designation of the aliens’ still-unlocated home planet as New Kerguelen.
While Phil had wisely kept the giant screen and makeshift scaffold stage in place from the previous year, keen to retain the iconic backdrop to draw as many photo-hunting tourists as possible, several popular outlets had moved into the storefronts of the U-shaped lot. These included flagship branches of Mansize Clothing and Beanstox Coffee, both of which sought to capitalise on the expensive commercials they had shot featuring Dan the previous year. The coffee shop was brimming with customers as Henry headed for the grill, and a young couple were happily posing for pictures against the world-famous backdrop.
Birchwood was thriving like few could remember. Town pride was high, too; locals no longer said they lived “just south of Colorado Springs,” and many who lived in-between now gave their location as a few miles from Birchwood rather than a few miles from the city.
Everyone in Birchwood had benefitted from the tourist income, but few if any had done as well as Phil Norris. The rejuvenation of his long-dormant drive-in lot had enabled him to get out of the pawn shop game, watching on indifferently as his old shop’s new owner turned it into an alien-themed tourist trap which sold everything from tiny meteorite fragments to expensive life-size replicas of the Messengers’ engraved plaques. These kinds of tourist stores were common in and around Birchwood, with another large concentration near Richard Walker’s old IDA building in Colorado Springs.
Phil caught sight of Henry’s arrival and walked right over to greet him, grinning like a mouse in a cheese factory. “Can you smell the money, Henry Boy? Business is about to explode like a meteor!”
Henry laughed as he made his way to the bar. Phil’s entrepreneurial spirit was hard to beat, but he certainly wasn’t the greedy or selfish man many might have assumed after a short meeting. He’d always been generous to the family and by all accounts had been very accommodating during Dan’s undesired spell in the public spotlight, when Henry was hospitalised and unable to help. Phil had done well out of Dan’s spotlight too, of course, and Henry could once again see dollar signs spinning in his old friend’s eyes.
An even older friend, Walter Byrd, then turned to greet Henry from his seat at the bar. “How’s Dan?” was the first thing the softly spoken man asked. Henry knew that his longtime neighbour had been even more helpful than Phil during the roughest months of the previous year, going beyond the call of duty by inviting Dan into his home and sticking by his side on live TV when a televised hypnosis went wrong.
“He’s doing okay,” Henry said. “Got a hell of a fright when he saw the news, but Emma and Clark are there.”
Walter, a former sheriff’s deputy known as Byrd to his close peers and Mr Byrd to everyone else, looked concerned. “What kind of fright? Does he think the meteor might have something to do with, you know…”
“Aliens?” Henry scoffed. “Nah. It will be strange for him to see Kerguelen and Kendrick back in the news, but I don’t think he was bothered by the anchors talking about hostility and Walker and all that crap. It was just a shock to see Kerguelen.”
“It’s better not to watch the news,” Mr Byrd said after a long and slow sip of his beer. “Negativity for breakfast, fear for lunch and dinner.”
