In the bottom drawer of the desk was a barely half-finished quart of Wild Turkey, and Colonel Roland Grist could hear it calling to him. It was the proper twenty-five year-old article as well, turn of the century, no dicking around.
He wasn’t going to reach for it, though, not with this… well, let’s be honest, here, this jumped-up whore watching him with her mocking eyes.
Grist found himself longing for the days when life had been simple, the days when he’d seen the world and killed people as an airborne ranger. Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria, Sudan, Zimbabwe. Even twenty years after a bunch of fundamentalist ragheads had flown a few planes into innocent buildings it could still be used as justification for invading hostile nations. God bless America. And if you happen to blind or cripple a few stone-throwing children or make some Congolese girl do something she doesn’t want to do on one of these extended vacations then whose to argue? Say what you like, an officer in the US Army still got you some goddamn respect.
Grist couldn’t imagine this Desoto girl being made to do a single thing she didn’t want. Quite the reverse, in fact.
In fact, Grist had the distinct impression that, should she ever feel like it, she was perfectly capable of spending months of research to find the single worst thing that he would rather stick a gun in his mouth rather than do, just so’s she could force him to do it.
“Where’s your friend?” Grist asked, more or less for the sake of something to say, and break the contemptuous silence with which she was currently regarding him.
“Eddie’s off getting some Head.” The Desoto woman shrugged. “I wouldn’t worry about it. He’s just funny that way.”
Her manner became more businesslike.
“The operation’s a go,” she said. “I want you to lock the base. Total embargo on communications: nothing coming in, nothing going out, you get me?”
It wasn’t even an order. It was a flat statement of how the world was going to be.
Nevertheless, Grist felt he ought to stick up for the autonomy of the US Military from commercial concerns.
“That might be, uh, problematic,” he said. “We maintain first-strike capability here. We have to maintain constant contact with the Pentagon, with the White House. I can’t simply-“
The Desoto woman snorted. “The White House doesn’t know you exist and the Pentagon doesn’t care. You can try them, if you like, before you lock this place down, but do you know what they’re gonna tell you to do? They’re gonna tell you to shut up and do exactly what I say because they’re picking up the check for this little operation.”
The Wild Turkey was really calling now. For an instant, Grist was struck by the vision of racking back the drawer, hauling out the bottle by the neck and smashing it against the side of the Desoto girl’s head.
The vision was so profoundly strong that, a second later, Grist realised that he was still sitting there, staring somewhat dumbly at a miraculously reconstituted and unbloodied Trix Desoto.
He even had to make a quick scan for a general lack of broken glass and a closed desk drawer, just to be sure.
He realised that the Desoto girl had spoken and was looking at him, coldly, for an answer.
“I, uh, beg you pardon?” he managed at last. “Ma’am.”
“I was merely saying,” the Desoto girl said, “that you’d better get used to the fact that you’re currently not a lot more than a cloakroom attendant for GenTech, looking after our crap. Now we’re handing in the ticket and we want it back.”
It happened back in the last century (said the Talking Head), back in the early 1960s and the classified fusion-bomb tests out here in Nevada.
Fusion, as we all know, doesn’t produce gamma or particle-radiation fallout, it just makes a fucking great hole in the ground. So it was with some surprise, and not without a certain degree of trepidation, that those involved subsequently detected massive amounts of radioactivity emanating from the impact-crater.
It wasn’t radioactivity, of course, not in any actual sense we know. It just tripped the Geigers in more or less the same way that radioactivity would.
It exhibited wave-particle properties similar to those of X-rays, or for that matter photons, but there were marked dissimilarities… What do I look like, some science-lecturer guy?
There’s reams of waveform analysis and whatever in the files, but the upshot is that there’s simply nothing to compare it to. It’s dissimilar to everything else in the world we know, in certain fundamental respects, and only similar to itself.
The phenomenon was ultimately termed Upsilonic Radiation (the Head continued) and people have spent lives and careers-their own and others-attempting to determine its basic nature and effect.
That’s secondary, though. The important thing is that, when they finally managed to knock up suits capable of protecting humans, well enough and long enough, to survive in the test-bomb crater, they found that the detonation had breached what was obviously an artificial chamber containing what we call the Artefact.
Bit of a suspicious coincidence, that, you say? Well, for one thing, there were one hell of a lot of bomb tests in the Fifties and Sixties, so you might say that we were due. If there was something hanging around down there and waiting to be found.
But more importantly you’re talking about what we’ll call a false congruity, a confusion between cause and effect. The only reason that we’re here to talk about the confluence of events-any confluence of events, for that matter-is that they happened in the first place.
You might was well say: isn’t it lucky trousers have two legs, otherwise they wouldn’t fit. Isn’t it lucky we have all these dogs to eat all the dog-food people make. When people actually had dogs as pets and didn’t eat them, anyway. Sometimes shit just happens, basically, to make a profoundly original philosophical point, and you simply have to deal with it.
As for the Artefact itself. You say it’s obviously a Ship, and that’s good. Very good, in fact. That’s the whole point of what we… well, we’ll get to that later.
The thing about that is that the first investigators on the scene didn’t see a Ship of any kind at all.
They saw any number of things, from a churning glob of protoplasm, to an insanely complicated mass of clockwork, to the Living Christ nailed to the cross, somehow transported through time and actually there. A giant telephone wrapped in barbed wire. Someone’s fat ugly mother dead and lying in state. A set of animated nest-tables dancing to “La Cucaracha” but not actually doing it…
It was different for everyone, what they saw-save for those who for some reason simply didn’t see a thing at all, and who went into spontaneous psychopathic fits when others insisted that there was, indeed, something there.
Film footage and, later, video, had the same general effect; nobody could agree on what they were seeing. Digital photography, on the other hand, interestingly enough, just shows a haze of dead pixels to everyone.
The Artefact was, simply, Other. It came from Somewhere Else. Some place where human words and concepts simply don’t apply. And the upshot was, of course, that the US Government found itself in sole possession of something supremely powerful and unique… with not the slightest idea of what it was.
So they decided to damn well find out.
Disinformation operations were set up, more or less along the lines of Roswell and the like to keep those who might be drawn towards the whole idea of “aliens” the hell out of the way.
Samples were taken, by way of the discovery that… well, samples were taken, anyway. Study of those samples led to quantum jumps in any number of fields, from the processes informing the Rapture Bug field-test in Des Moines and the subsequent Zarathustra procedures, to Al-grade transputer technology, to the containment fields that made hydrogen fusion in vehicles a practicality. The basis for our world, in fact, such as it is.
All very nice, if that’s the sort of thing that floats your boat… but none of it led to a breath of understanding as to what the Artefact actually was.
A partial breakthrough came just after the turn of the century, when a programme was instituted of exposing live subjects to minute traces of Artefact material.
This was while the US Government was engaged in what was called a War on Terror. Complete and utter nonsense, of course; you might was well declare a War on Literacy-which they were also doing, believe you me; they just didn’t come right out and say it.
Anyhow. The thing about waging a war on a methodology, as opposed to anything concrete, was that you could target anyone who you pretty much liked, and pretty much get away with anything in the name of it.
Initially, the live subjects were suspected so-called “terrorists”, who at the time were busily being detained and stockpiled without due process. The experiments were… not a success, unless you count spontaneous mutation into something abominable, feculent and dead to be successful.
It was believed that the material itself was in some way attempting to adapt those to whom it was exposed, so they could survive the exposure, and spectacularly failing.
The theory was then advanced that, since the experimental subjects were mostly adults, the altered genome was fighting against an already established phoneme to catastrophic effect. It was suggested that the procedure be tried using infants.
I know, I know, but remember that the US was fighting, so it said, monsters who would cheerfully murder American babies-and if the cost of fighting them was to do likewise then what were the odds?
In any case, once the idea was mentioned, some bright spark remembered some research that had been done more than twenty years before, in that previous period of venal Republican numbskullery, the 1980s.
The precise same experiments, it transpired, had been conducted under something called the Janus Project, under the aegis of a Secret Service offshoot calling itself Section Eight. And yeah, but of course, didn’t that lead to a lot of bureaucratic confusion. Intentionally so. It kept the Project buried under disinformation.
The Janus Project had been reckoned to be a failure, too. The subjects either spontaneously mutated into monstrous et cetera, or absolutely nothing seemed to happen to them at all. Those who survived were dispersed in a manner that wouldn’t arouse undue attention, as opposed to merely killing them, and the Project was quietly wrapped up.
Twenty years later, when they went through the files and tracked down the survivors, the government found a small surprise. The science of genetics had advanced more than somewhat-and they found some really freaky things happening with the survivors’ junk DNA. And the interesting thing about that was that it was generational. The survivors had passed the modifications on to their kids.
So, of course, there was nothing for it but to haul that second generation of kids in and start the whole procedure of exposing them all over again.
The problem was that, once again, the Project failed. Oh, fewer of the kids actually died, but nothing much else happened either. The Government gave up, dumped people like you out in various out-of-the-way shitholes, decided to go back to being a glorified gun-runner and washed its hands of the whole sorry business.
So, basically, after all that work and effort, all that suffering, the whole thing just turned out to be totally without meaning and pointless. Oh, well. You gotta laugh, eh?