Rift
Man in Black: Your scientists have yet to discover how neural networks create self-consciousness, let alone how the human brain processes two-dimensional retinal images into the three-dimensional phenomenon known as perception. Yet you somehow brazenly declare that seeing is believing!
22
Lance stared at his hands, sitting in the driver's seat of the car in the parking lot while Keith went inside to pick up some more coffee. He was going to go in with him, but then had decided better of it and stayed behind. Maybe a couple of minutes apart would be good for them, so that they would figure out that the sidewise glances and glares weren't getting them anywhere.
Of course, then Lance realized that would have to apply to the way he approached things, as well, not just Keith, and found himself pouting. Staring at his hands, crossed in his lap, he suddenly wished that he was back at home. He wished that he was in his family's backyard, his mom and dad babbling at each other in the kitchen about whatever they were cooking that night, his siblings running around inside, his sister off to the right of the back porch, reading a book, and him, looking up to the sky. There was a freshness that seemed to surround his home, a sort of feeling of newness and life. It wasn't that this feeling was totally absent now, but it was a sort of a synesthesiatic feeling of nostalgia he couldn't shake. He remembered being there as a kid, as a teenager, with the sounds and smells of his family around him, looking up to the sky and wanting to study the stars, to know more about them, to see what was really out there.
Now, he wondered how much of that was just foolish hope for something that wasn't really there at all, or if it was as earnest as he had once thought it. He wondered more and more, now that he found he couldn't fully trust what he'd always known, always learned of...
He had always wanted to find the stars because of what they were, these pinpoints in the sky that offered so much space and knowledge and fascination for him, but if what Shirogane was saying was true, if what he was implying was anything close to what was actually out there, that meant that...
It meant that everything he had ever done was completely foolish, misguided, and off-base. It meant that all of the work he had done studying stars, exoplanets, pulsars, nebulae, and galaxies was completely different from what was actually there, and the nostalgic feeling of home, with those idealized stars smattered out there in the galaxy, was nothing but a fantasy now. Everything that he'd built, everything that he knew, it was nothing at all in the face of the aliens that Shiro conjectured were truly out there.
He didn't know how that would really affect the way home felt to him. Even now, as he wished for home, he wondered if it would really have that same charm as he had always felt. He wondered if it would even be remotely the same, without that feeling...
The door on the passenger side opened, and his partner slid into the seat, placing his cup of coffee in the cupholder without saying anything to Lance, buckling himself in without putting down his own cup.
Lance pulled the car out of the parking lot and they drove in a terse silence through the small town, the sand swirling around the car in little dust devils, the horizon shimmering gently in the late-afternoon heat. They pulled into the motel and went inside, Keith tossing his jacket over the back of the small chair in the room set up at the card table before they began to discuss what had just happened.
"Well, you were a perfect asshole in there," said Keith, putting his hands on his hips.
"What were we even doing?" said Lance, throwing his hands up frustration. He had planned to approach this calmly, but the second he was actually confronted with an actual confrontation, it didn't really work out the same way he had planned. "We don't need tabloid stories from some crazy guy who—"
"He had valuable insight, and if we'd listened for more than a half a second, maybe…"
"Maybe what?" said Lance, taking a step closer to his partner. "We'd get a good lead on El Chupacabra, too?"
"We could learn something more about what it is the government is trying to withhold! But you laughed in his face, and that doesn't get us any good leads!" Keith stepped closer, too, his face turning red with anger.
"Leads on the aliens."
"Yes, leads related to…"
"Listen, I've heard my fair share of conspiracy theories in my day, so let's cut all of this Scooby-Doo mystery bullshit and get to what's really going on."
Kogane's face was only a few inches from his, and Lance could smell his coffee breath, feel the anger radiating off of his face in waves of heat. Keith actually leaned in a bit more as his scowl opened up into an angry reply.
"This is what I'm talking about!" he shouted, and Lance almost recoiled, his eyes widening. "If you don't believe it, it's some conspiracy bullshit!" He took a deep breath, but he was far from finished.
"Consider this for a moment. Just pause and think before you say anything, for once in your God damn life. Maybe what Shiro was telling us was just some delusion brought on by the stress of his experience. Maybe the trauma of losing the rest of his crew and crashing to Earth alone cause him to create an elaborate fantasy just so that he can wrap his mind around it. Maybe it's even worse for him since he has been totally disgraced, thrown out of the only life he's ever known, and constantly told that he is crazy. Maybe he's sticking to his guns, sticking to his beliefs in the same way you are right now, and he has been cut down at every turn." He took a breath. "I give him a chance to tell us his story, because I thought he might have something important to tell us. Maybe it wasn't about his experience itself—maybe it was just the way that the government hushed it up, or some detail about the Holts that might have pointed us in the right direction there. Plus, it finally gives the guy a chance to tell his story to someone who won't immediately dismiss him, someone he can trust."
"I..."
"But you weren't thinking about that, were you?" He backed off now, crossing his arms and raising an eyebrow. "You weren't thinking about that. You were instead keeping these ridiculous closed-minded better-than-you attitudes that you can just say 'I told you so' to the guy who's been through more shit than you'll ever deal with." He jabbed Lance in the chest with his pointer finger. "Instead, you're just caught up in how this is all about you."
Keith withdrew his finger, looked Lance in the eye as if he was about to say something else, but then just shook his head and turned away, sighing as he did. He turned and grabbed his jacket from the chair.
"I'm going to review the case files again, cross-check them with the information we got from Shiro." He paused by the door. "I'll have my cell if you need me, but..." He paused a moment by the door, his fist clenching and releasing his fist. "...don't call." The door slammed. He was gone.
23
Keith was good at ignoring his feelings. It was something he had done somewhat semi-professionally for years, and he had the process down to a near-science. He took whatever he was feeling—usually some mix of disappointment, frustration, and rage—and buried it under intense work. It was what had gotten him off of the streets and into the program at Quantico, and it was what got him from there into the Violent Crimes Division. It was his tenacity, his ability to stick to his guns, that got him into the more unorthodox investigations the rest of the bureau wanted to leave behind. It was the way he could put all of his criticisms underneath the layers of work that he could move forward and do so well despite the fact that no one else in the bureau believed in what he was doing, in the importance of his work. It was how he did what he did.
Now was no different. He was shaking as he pulled out of the motel and took off down toward Hunk and Pidge's house, where he had effectively set up shop. He could feel the heat on the back of his neck from his own anger, and he could feel the way the embarrassment of what Lance had said to Shiro hung in his chest like a wet towel. He exchanged slight pleasantries with Hunk and Pidge at the door, but they were wary enough of his fake smile that they backed off and let him through to the garage where he had set up something of a pin board on the side wall, near Pidge's computer station.
Keith rolled the chair over and began to pick his way back through the notes, photocopied and highlighted as they were, looking for something that he could connect back to what Shiro had told them. If he looked deep enough, if he concentrated hard enough, he wouldn't have to think about Lance, about what he said, about how he had embarrassed Shiro and made a farce of the whole investigation. He shuffled through the documents labeled as a part of the Kerberos Project and told himself that he wasn't thinking about the way that he wasn't even sure about Shiro's story, about how far-fetched it sounded, even to him. He'd heard his share of abduction stories and alien experiences in his time investigating, in his communications via message boards and correspondence societies, but he had never heard anything as detailed or out there as what Shiro had told them. There really wasn't any actual proof of what he had said about the ship, about the aliens, about the egg-shaped craft he had escaped in. None of that was provable. Maybe Lance, in his thick-headed, rude, and callous way, was right.
But there was more to it than just that. There was the cover up. There was the discharge of Shiro, his disgrace. There was no way they'd discharged him without a mental evaluation, and evidently he'd come up clean. There was no way they would let a man with delusions such as that walk right out. And there was the fact that the Kerberos mission wasn't officially closed after that, the fact that there were agents collecting pieces of debris under its jurisdiction, the fact that there was such an intense cover-up that there had to be something being covered up.
There had to be some truth to what Shiro had said, and it was his job to pinpoint what it was. There had to be some consistency. He picked up the report in front of him, reading through it closely instead of thinking about how close he had been to Lance as they'd been yelling, how he'd felt his partner's warmth in the way he defended himself.
KERBEROS PROJECT:
Locate object .489, downed 0240 at localized coordinates. Proceed with extreme caution. Object may be hazardous. Use extreme caution. No force expected.
Agents assigned will remain vigilant for observers as well as stargazers. Be aware of debris, as well as additional objects from above. Classify as seen fit.
Keith glanced to the next paper, dated a few days later. It read mainly the same, though this one referred to .490, which had him thinking that it was the way they numbered and categorized the pieces of whatever this was a piece of. However, that meant that there had to be almost 500 other pieces of space debris they had categorized similarly. This was something big, bigger and more complex than it already had seen. Keith scribbled " ?" on a sticky note and added it to the little display he had put together on the wall, connecting the different clues they'd collected so far. He swiveled from the papers to the small hunk of machinery. Hunk and Pidge had gone through a number of tests with it, but they hadn't been able to crack any of its secrets yet.
This, of course, didn't mean there wasn't more to find out about the object, but there was definitely an air of mystery surrounding it. It was just a harmless piece of broken something.
Keith's eyes opened wider and he swiveled back to his stacks of paper, to the files he had been reading through, and retrieved the report he had been reading. It had mentioned something about the debris, something that he now suddenly found suspect. He scanned through the page before he found what he was looking for. "Object may be hazardous. Use extreme caution. No force expected."
On the surface, this didn't seem like much. The space junk might be hazardous, whether it be radioactive or hot or infected with some space virus. It made sense to be cautious. However, it was that third sentence that stood out to him. "No force expected.". Of course, it made sense that there would be no force expected; they were retrieving something secret from the desert. No one else knew about it or cared about it, so there would be no way that they should have even needed to include that statement, unless there was some sort of precedent for confrontation. That would leave two suspects: the little conspiracy crew helping him out, who he didn't think would still be free to investigate if these agents knew of their operations, and the possibility that something had come with the debris before, and had tried to defend it.
"Holy shit," said Keith, falling back in his chair. Maybe there was something more to what Shiro had been saying than a vague mention of conspiracy. His hand went to his pocket to grab his cell phone, to tell Lance about this, to pull him in on it, but he hesitated and instead slowly pulled his hand away. He could wait telling his partner until Lance had cooled off, too. The words he'd left him with were slightly more than cutting, and he wasn't about to deal with him until he'd calmed down. Until they both had. Instead, he called out to Hunk and Pidge, pushing down thoughts of his partner as he did, getting back to work.
24
Lance looked at the few printed-out photographs in front of him and honestly had a hard time telling what was different about them. He felt like a fool-it was clunky, outdated, and usually wrong to find stuff in space using just what you could see, but that was really what he had to work with. This was usually something he had been good at, memorizing the positions of stars and where they were in the sky. It was a part of what had gotten him into astrophysics in the first place. Other people had gotten into the field because they liked the movie Apollo 13 or they were good with radios, but he was there because he was interested in the stars, the planets, and where they were up there. So now, staring at these few pictures and trying to find where the debris split in the sky, where it might have come from, if there was anything out of the ordinary, he felt like a total dolt for not finding it immediately.
It could be that his mind was a million miles away from the space he was trying to find. It could be that he was doing his best to not think about how much what Keith had said was accurate, and that his best was, as usual, not enough.
This was his first mission, his first case as an agent at the FBI, and instead of finding some solvable problem like he'd been looking for, he'd been stuck with this outrageous case of conspiracy and extraterrestrials. and he wanted it to not be that way. He'd been obstinate. But he had also been rude, and that wasn't what he had meant to do-he just meant to... to express his frustration. And now, Keith was right. He was an asshole, and he wasn't doing anything good for anyone. He wasn't helping Keith in whatever this investigation was, and he sure as hell wasn't helping Shiro in any of his recovery from the ordeal he'd been through. Instead, he was sitting here feeling sorry for himself, he was causing problems, and he was dead weight all around. The only reason he was here at all was because Ross had asked him to spy on Keith, keep an eye on him, whatever he wanted to call it, the point was that he wasn't even there for his skills as an investigator, he was there because he was a placeholder.
And he had still fucked it up.
Lance felt terrible, but he knew that there was nothing he could do, at this point, that would fix the things he'd done. And even if he did fix them, he would still be on this wild goose chase, looking at things that he knew could empirically never be real.
The stars didn't line up, and that frustrated him. He should have been able to see the simple deviation between two photographs of the sky. He knew these stars, where they were both in the sky and their location in the galaxy, and at least with the naked eye, what was visible, that should have been enough. But he couldn't.
He pushed himself back from the card table in the motel room and looked out of the window. The sun was finally beginning to hide itself behind the crests and plateaus of the horizon, and a purplish glow was descending across the desert. Only a few stars, one of which was just the International Space Station, had appeared in the sky. Lance felt a sudden wave of nostalgia for the stars, for when calculating and measuring them had been his full-time job. For a moment, he forgot why he had changed his profession.
That was when he realized he was looking in the wrong place for answers, for the next puzzle piece. He wasn't going to find clues in the sky—they'd already fallen from there. They were somewhere on the ground, because that's where they'd fallen.
Finding where they'd fallen from was going to be a whole lot more difficult than finding where they were stored. When those agents came into the desert and took those pieces away, they had to bring them somewhere. Finding that would be a whole lot more tangible than the wild theories Keith was coming up with, and it would get them closer to where they were heading in regards to the cover-up part of this case.
He stuffed the couple of photographs back into the plain file folder he'd been holding them in and forced that back into the briefcase that existed only to house their already overflowing files under the table and hurriedly pulled his jacket on. Kogane had said not to call him, so he wasn't about to. But this was the first major breakthrough he'd really had all on his own, and if Keith saw that he was really putting effort into the case, well… it would show that he had what it took to actually be an investigator, rather than a hanger-on. That was what he wanted, really. And it wouldn't make up for what he did, but it would be a step in the right direction. It had to be.
He finished getting his arm down the sleeve of his jacket and yanked open the door to the motel room with gusto, and took a step out of it to nearly collide with his partner. "K-Keith?"
Keith took a recoil step, his eyes wide with surprise for a half a moment before narrowing back to his resting half-glare. "Lance."
They both stared at each other for another brief moment before both speaking at once:
"I figured something out, something big."
"I know where we need to look next."
They caught each other's eyes again, and both found it hard to keep back the small grins tugging at their mouths.
Mulder: You have to be willing to see.
Scully: I wish it were that simple.
Mulder: Scully, you have to believe me. Nobody else on this whole damn planet does or ever will. You're my one in five billion.
