swans and madeleines
Fort Meade
To all outward appearances he was a young bird watcher. A limb of a tree with the branches cut off served as a walking stick. Tan cargo pants, an old Eddie Bauer flannel shirt and hiking boots made up his wardrobe. Over his shoulder was a knapsack and if anyone felt the need to investigate what he was carrying, they would find a bird watching guide for the area that had been checked out of the library, a small notepad with rudimentary pencil sketches of local birds, a thermos of coffee, three meatloaf sandwiches, a fun size bag of chips and a paper bag from a local bakery containing some madeleines. He was exactly what most would imagine if they were to conjure up a bird watcher in their minds.
Only he wasn't.
He was actually an illegal alien wanted by most of the governments around the world, but especially by the Americans. He had an idea of what they wanted with him, but only a vague notion of who 'they' actually were. After being on the run since he was a child, he'd decided to change that. Fort Meade is the home of the NSA, you see, the largest intelligence gathering operation in the world. He'd found this out by visiting an Internet café and googling it. There were even pictures of the massive building, aerial shots too.
He'd done a little more research and even checked out the material Edward Snowden had released about the extent of their spying programs. Like most people Clark had heard about the Snowden story, but probably hadn't followed it as closely as he should have. Snowden, a hero or traitor, depending on your point of view had once worked for a subcontractor and felt the public had a right to know just what was going on. Apparently everyone was being monitored, every call within and to the United States was being monitored. Unheard of amounts of data, massive in its scope were being gathered from phones, computers and the Internet. The largest Telecom, Internet and Computer companies were providing the data. All this had been happening in secret, without warrants or probable cause, 2 things you usually need for wire taps according to US law.
Willie Sutton, a famous bank robber, was asked once why he robbed banks. His reported answer was because that's where the money is.
So if you want some information it seemed logical to go to where they are collecting unimaginable amounts of it on everything.
The building was heavily guarded, shielded and sensors would detect any attempted to bug it. Clark didn't need to do any of the sorts of things a usual spy would. He just needed to be close enough to listen. In a much smaller way he was trying to do exactly the same thing the people in the building were doing, listening to everyone's private conversations. Only he was listening to the spies who were listening to everyone else.
He made his way through the woods to a small lake, which was really a big pond, but the locals called it a lake so there seemed no reason to argue with them. Finding a nice shaded spot in the tall grass, he set his knapsack down and got comfortable. He poured himself a cup of coffee and just took in the surroundings. It was a little pocket of nature in the middle of this entire industrial sprawl.
As he took a sip of coffee Clark let his body relax. What he was attempted today was something new to him. All of his life he'd been struggling to shut the noise out so as not to be overwhelmed by it. Just as those at the NSA would hopefully learn, too much information made it impossible to find any meaning. It was like standing in a room with 10,00 people screaming at the same time and trying to pick out the one person screaming about how much they liked their Volkswagen Jetta. It all became white noise, meaningless static at some point.
Setting the coffee down, he took out the notepad and started to roughly sketch out a few of the birds he could see. They weren't meant to be professional, only to keep up the illusion in case someone was watching. It seemed like a wise assumption that here of all places, someone would always be watching and listening. As the pencil made the first line of one of the trumpeter swans' neck, Clark let some of his control ease. It had become second nature to block everything out, so it took a few moments of concentration to do the opposite.
Bit by bit he let his hearing expand and it was as if the world around him had come alive. Most imagine a nature scene as eerily quiet, yet this is hardly the truth. If you take the time to allow yourself to adjust you discover sound is all around you. It's just different sound then you've become accustomed to. They are quiet sounds at first, like the rustle of the leaves but once you being to recognize them, what you thought as empty is filled with sound.
Letting his reach extend the sounds of the modern world began to filter in. Cars on the parkway, lawn mowers from the neighboring suburbs, the whirl and grinding of small factories and most of all voices. Voices on top of voices bombarded his senses. Different pitches and rhythms, intensities and accents, each voice seemed desperate for attention as if they were afraid no one could hear them. Part of him wanted to listen to all of them, so that by some kind of magic each would know that someone was listening.
Magic like that doesn't exist no matter how hard you want to believe it does. As a wave of melancholy washed over him, Clark turned his focus towards the massive building a mile away. Machines, the constant hum of machines seemed to overwhelm all other sound coming from the building. It was the constant din of the modern workplace only magnified a thousand fold. As human voices began to filter in, they seemed almost secondary to the hum of the machines, as if they were only there in service of the machines and not the other way around.
As he listened trying to isolate the voices, he understood this was really a hit or miss proposition. He had no context for what he was hearing so the names were meaningless. Once he became accustomed to this extension of his senses he tried to listen for inflection in the way people spoke the names. Titles give a clue to the structure of things, but so do the way people say someone's name. It's the difference between how you say your boss's name and one of your coworkers, or how you say your professor's name versus one of your classmates. As if he were running a search engine he also tried to hone in on key words, Meta and alien being on the top of the list.
It was a different challenge than anything he'd tried before. If it took the whole day to work it out he was prepared for that. Picking up the notepad again, he continued the rough sketch of the swan while letting his mind sift through the voices. Even in the most secure work environments, people still like to talk. The swan sketches also served another purpose. Steganography is the art and science of encoding hidden messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient, suspects the existence of the message. The names he picked up and wanted to check out he would work into the drawing. Since he was the sender and the intended recipient, only he would know their meaning. Even if something unfortunate happened and he was caught, they would never know what exactly he'd learned.
While he was Kryptonian, he had spent all his life on Earth. In many ways he's brain was wired to think like a human. Some of those were shared by both races and in fact were shared by all intelligent life forms. One of the most important ways this manifests itself is in the way we think of time and how it constantly plays a role in our lives. At once we can be in the present, the past and the future. So as Clark sat listening and sketching he could be in the present, taking down names to investigate later, yet also the swans could remind him of a trip he'd taken with his parents to the zoo when he was ten and even more a word or phrase might trigger the thought of something he had to do later.
Each of us live in all 3 of these time frames. Decisions we make in the present might be influenced by past experiences or by future plans. Our minds are constantly shuffling and mixing them. The madeleines Clark had brought might bring an involuntary memory back, of a winter day in Duluth with his parents from his childhood. The texture of the madeleine against his tongue might trigger other sensory memories of that day. How the kitchen smelled, his father's laugh, the feel of his mother's fingers running through his hair or the way the heat from the baseboard radiator caressed his ankles and moved up his pant leg. It's the way certain pieces of music can take you right back to specific times and places. You're still in the present, yet those memories seem just as real in the moment.
As Clark sat and gathered information, a lifetime time of memories flittered through his mind. Some bad times, but mostly good one filled those memories. In body Jonathan and Martha Kent might be gone, but in spirit they would always live on within their only son's memory.
There is an old Irish folk saying that as long as someone remembers you, you're never full dead. In a way it's as close as any of us will come to experience immortality.
(A/N – Each chapter in this story and all the previous stories are basically first drafts. This can sometimes lead to mistakes in grammar and spelling. Another result of this is that the balance between information, ideas, plot and dialog isn't always going to be perfect. Some readers might not like this. I certainly understand that. In a previous story I probably went a little overboard with describing what people were eating and the menus. ; )
The idea behind it though, I think is worthwhile. Instead of just saying 'he's poor' or 'they had a wonderful meal' the idea is to give a glimpse of what it means to be poor or what exactly was their wonderful meal. If I were writing about a wedding where everyone dressed up as Vikings, that's the sort of detail I think people need to get the full picture.
It was pointed out I'm posting this on a public forum, which is something I've always been aware of. I never expected everyone to agree with my views or like the characterizations or even the stories themselves. It's why I've always allowed anonymous reviews and rarely delete them. If you don't like the story, feeling free to not read it. If you don't like certain parts of the story, skip over them. If you have a complain or criticism, go ahead and post it. I'm cool with all of those.
If you're expecting something that fits perfectly with how you see the world or how you think the story should go, there I can't help you. It's never going to be perfect, but hopefully it's interesting and different.
So thanks for reading and if this isn't your cup of tea, no hard feelings if you take a pass.)
