Episode 1.10: Blindness
Towards the end of the first full week in June, Director Ken Roberts was set to receive news of a development that his staff assured him would prove most interesting. He had ordered that each of the children known to be cavorting with Unknowns be observed as much as humanly possible with the department's available supply of drones. No longer were Ken and his staff engaging in the intelligence equivalent of ambulance chasing. Now they were using this motley group of adolescents to find Unknowns as they appeared. The focus of the agency had therefore shifted from juggling data-gathering, threat neutralization, and asset development and innovation to being more narrowly honed in on attempting to figure out just how Unknowns operated. Ken hoped that soon they would be able to deal with these bizarre lifeforms themselves. He had high hopes for that Jacquelyn's report would be of a breakthrough which would bring them closer to that goal.
Hopes and nerves were both riding high, and so Jacquelyn was constantly fidgeting as she sat waiting outside of her superior's office. After he had finished receiving the latest updates on the youths under observation from Joe and dismissed him, Ken Roberts beckoned Jacquelyn to come into his office. Ken's workspace was bare of any personal effects. No diplomas or pictures hung on the small room's walls, and no knickknacks littered its owner's desk. The small gray room was a workspace, not just primarily, but entirely.
Sitting behind his heavy wooden desk, Ken Roberts was as single-minded as his surroundings. At Jacquelyn's entrance, he tossed the file he was looking at on top of a pile of similar manila folders and looked her up and down, running his eyes over the younger woman in an unfamiliar way which left Jacquelyn feeling less like a woman and more like a prized racehorse being gauged for its fitness. Honestly, she was not certain which idea was worse. Still, she stood there and tried to occupy herself by mentally rehearsing what she would say, but she had not even been able to go over her main points in her head when Ken finished his silent evaluation.
"Sit," he said, and she did.
Jacquelyn wasted no time in getting right to the point. "Sir, a few of our drones picked up some footage that you may find enlightening," she recited in a single breath.
Ken's face was unreadable as he said, "From this morning?"
"Yes, sir."
Ken either failed to notice that Jacquelyn was a bundle of nerves or he simply did not care. He let the silence hang in the air for a few moments before asking crisply, "And you've already analyzed the footage?"
"Yes, sir," Jackie answered again in spite of her dry mouth.
"From all of the available angles?" pressed Ken.
This time she could only nod.
Ken regarded her in the same evaluating way as before while Jacquelyn stared mutely at her lap in her black slacks. Then Ken softly said, "Thank you, Ms. Arvad," and he turned to his computer.
As Ken sat clicking his mouse with one hand and picking up his office phone with the other, Jacquelyn beat a hasty retreat back to her cubicle, wetting her lips as she walked briskly through the office and planning her route to the outside with for some fresh air and a much-needed cigarette.
Inside of his office, Ken was navigating his way through the labyrinthine corridors of the computer drive containing all of the archived drone footage that the department had accumulated since the crash and subsequent upgrade of its systems. Simultaneously, he dialed his deputy's extension and, when the ringing had been replaced with a human voice, Ken's baritone said simply, "Eddy, come to my office," before he hung up.
He did not have to wait even a minute before Eddy was in his office, huffing from his brisk walk. "What do you need, Ken?"
Eddy's tone was as casual as he could manage with a man who he thought of as both his friend and his superior. He was hoping that he would be playing the part of Eddy instead of his role as Deputy Director Edward S. Stephens, but one look at Ken's serious expression told him it was not to be. Still, despite his obvious command over Eddy, Ken did not press a point that he did not need to. Instead, Ken told Eddy to, "Pull up a seat," before he resumed his search for the video that Jacquelyn had brought to his attention.
Eddy got up and was about to carry over the simple chair between Ken's desk and the door when a thought occurred to him. Carefully, Eddy pushed the office's door shut before carrying his chair over to join Ken on the other side of the heavy desk. As he lowered himself into his seat, Eddy saw that the director had been busy pulling up four different videos and aligning them so that they covered the whole screen of the thin monitor. With a few more clicks, all four began playing.
Each of the recordings had been provided by a different drone, each one only recently assigned to observe a different pair of the children and the Unknowns. In keeping with the proud tradition of government agencies, each of the adolescents had been appended with a code name even though rudimentary surveillance and crosschecking had quickly yielded all of their identities. To the rest of the department, Ken had explained that this was a simple bureaucratic matter, but privately he believed that it helped his staff with thinking of the subjects of their surveillance as targets and not children.
The pair being observed in the top-left recording were a fat blue bird and a tall, awkward-looking boy with glasses named Joshua Kleberg, who had been codenamed "Mercury". Across from that media player was one depicting a slender teenage girl with long, straight brown hair and a pale reptilian Unknown draped over her shoulders. Her real name was Lynnette Fortas, but her government-given moniker was "Venus". Below that footage, another feed showed an inexpressive, broad-shouldered young man, dubbed "Jupiter", but actually named Todd Connally, getting out of a heavy red truck and then assisting an Unknown that looked like a black-scaled dinosaur out of the passenger side door. The final recording was centered on "Mars", also known as Emily Stevenson, a young woman whose mane of wavy crimson hair had decided her moniker. Accompanying her was a short humanoid creature whose head and hands appeared to be covered in the colorful petals of flowers which had not yet bloomed.
"This is from this morning?" Eddy asked, and then gave himself a mental kick for forgetting about the timestamps in the lower left-hand corner of each video. The department had lost two of its flyers during some incident earlier today, before the office even opened, and Eddy suspected that he had been called because Ken had some information about what had happened, as well as ideas to prevent it from happening again.
Ken didn't comment on Eddy's foolish question, instead they both watched silently until Eddy ventured another inquiry, "Wait, were they all recording in the same place?"
This question was quickly answered without Ken's input as well, as the cast of children and Unknowns began populating each other's videos until it became obvious that the four drones were recording the exact same scene from four different angles. "Looks like they're still working together," Ken noted, a strange dark undertone in his otherwise even voice. "It wasn't a [onetime deal]."
Eddy didn't know how to respond to that, so he did not say anything and just watched the screen. Despite their apparent urgency, the various parties in the videos had still found time to talk, or at least the humans had, in-between checking their colorful array of smartphones. The Unknowns in the video stood in their own cluster and were all looking in the same direction. The creatures' matching stares were unnerving in their alienness, especially when compared to the more natural shuffling and fidgeting of the young adults.
What the children had discussed Eddy could only guess. He assumed that they had been forming a plan of attack, but for all he knew the kids could have been discussing their homework. While the department had implemented the still-evolving puzzle-mapping technology in all of their recording equipment, that had only been a fix for the visual side of the spying equation. When it came to recording sound, the mere presence of an Unknown put everything on the fritz.
Before Eddy could dwell on that topic any longer, the motley assembly of children and Unknown in the videos began to run in the direction of whatever it was the Unknowns had been observing. The artificial intelligence programmed into the drones had gone to work and the four silent observers appeared to have dutifully followed the group, wordlessly coordinating with one another on which angles to shoot and which of the robotic cameramen should capture them. The only hitch came when the drones attempted to film what Eddy assumed was a new Unknown.
This same issue had come up before. The persistence of the problem continued to irritate Ken, as Eddy cautiously observed the director clenching his angular jaw. While the exact science behind the phenomenon was still being studied, for some reason the first appearance of an Unknown was always heralded by the manifestation of a thin barrier surrounding a large circular area. The department's field agents had all described the sight in remarkably consistent terms as a heavy blanket of opaque fog that seemed to crackle with electricity. But those eyewitness account had not been, could not be, collaborated by the drones' observations. The machines did not sputter and die in the presence of Unknowns anymore, but the same puzzle-mapping technology which had proven so valuable in solving one predicament still floundered when it came to this simple collection of mist. There were very complicated technical reasons for why this happened, but the director had not been impressed with Eddy's first attempt at explaining them, and he thought it wise not to revisit his points at this time.
When faced with what they had processed as a shifting mosaic of imperceptibly small patches of colors and hues, two of the drones had given up on filming their assigned targets and instead hovered in place, transfixed by the unfathomable white wall. Their fellow unmanned surveillance units were not to be deterred from their mission, however, and, as the four children and four Unknowns charged into the fog, those two drones followed them at a safe distance. Ken made a quick note of this on the memo pad he had pulled out of his desk and then minimized the feeds of the transfixed drones in favor of their more proactive brethren.
Inside of the dome was a startling vision, captured, transmitted, and saved in all of its bizarreness, albeit only after a short burst of static that occurred when the drones had penetrated the barrier. Although the robotic spies' overhead view of the area did not make the facial expressions of the targeted group of teenagers easy to read, both Ken and Eddy each had an idea of what was going through their heads.
"What the-" Eddy wondered breathlessly, but he only mouthed the third word of his incredulity.
In addition to the humans and Unknowns which were under the department's constant surveillance, three additional beings were inside of the fog. Two of them, a boy with shiny midnight black hair and a diminutive creature which appeared to be wearing an equally dark sack over its head, were interesting developments, to be sure, but they were not what had prompted Eddy's outburst. That honor was taken by the giant kangaroo. After observing clashes involving variously a fire-breathing dinosaur, a glowing snake, and a lizard covered in flowers, neither Eddy nor Ken should have been this surprised, especially after the Unknown that resembled a centaur. But while a few of these abnormal things did not appear outright threatening at first, such as the portly bird by Mercury's side and the recently acquired specimen contained within the building's sublevels, it was an unspoken article of faith among the department's staff that dangerous monsters would look like, well, dangerous monsters. Never before had an Unknown been recorded that looked so downright silly. That it looked so ridiculous even as Eddy and Ken watched it pummel the Unknown with the bag on its head with just highlighted how downright weird the office's work had become over the last few weeks.
This peculiar Unknown was tall, but sturdy, with thick, powerful legs and a no less impressive tail. While the creature's arms were less prominent, they still rippled with muscle as the upper limbs coiled and uncoiled to deliver rapid, devastating combinations of punches against the smaller Unknown. Its fists were contained in a set of bright red boxing gloves that looked to Eddy like they belonged in an old Looney Tunes cartoon, especially given the matching shoes containing the Unknown's expansive feet. A navy-blue helmet with an impenetrable black visor obscured the brown and white-furred Unknown's head, save for its nose and the grin it wore as it lay into the huddled Unknown cowering before it.
It took a superhuman effort of professionalism for Eddy not to voice his initial thoughts on what he was seeing to Ken. After all, the teenagers had recovered from the startling sight of a garishly-dressed kangaroo within a few seconds and had shifted easily to combative stances. All of the kids had mouthed orders to their respective accomplices, and even without the benefit of sound, it was clear that the individual humans had issued their commands in different ways. Eddy watched as the mouths of the girl and boy codenamed Mars and Mercury respectively moved rapidly and expressively, with enthusiastic grins emerging on both of their faces at the prospect of action. By comparison, their allies, the willowy Venus and the cold-eyed Jupiter, seemed much less verbose in communicating with their respective Unknowns. A few words had been all it took for all of the children's Unknowns to join the fray. The row of monsters on the screen attacked with a discordant mess of fire, ice, light, and yellow particles. There had been no finesse or strategy, just a wholesale display of firepower arrayed against a single target. Even so, Eddy still wondered if the kids might have pulled it off and put this new Unknown down with one combined attack
The tremendous outpouring of destructive force might have ended the whole episode right then and there, but the larger Unknown had sprung over the onrushing attacks with a mighty leap so that they exploded or dissipated uselessly against the black asphalt of the Target parking lot. Once in the air, the Unknown had spun around with surprising agility and lashed out at its new foes with its powerful tail. Only the narrow, low Unknown paired with Venus had managed to avoid the counterattack, but the muscular saurian, the chubby penguin, and the flowered monster had all been flung away from the bulky marsupial to plan and had to recover quickly to plan their next move.
"Is this all?" Eddy muttered under his breath. When Ken did not say anything, Eddy risked elaborating, "The appearance of another one of these kids is certainly an interesting development, but nothing that couldn't be summed up in a memo. We know that none of our pet Unknowns have been killed because we would have been informed of that immediately. So why are we watching a recording of yet another skirmish?"
"Quiet," said Ken, and at once Eddy fell silent. The director had not let himself be distracted from the videos for a moment. One feed depicted all of the Unknowns tensed up, but no more attacks had been produced by either the semi-clothed kangaroo or the assorted other Unknowns. This static picture was contrasted by the scene being recorded by the other drone. While the monsters had all bristled and prepared to renew their clash, the children had fallen into a squabble, apparently centered on how Mars and the new boy, Saturn, if the current naming scheme was going to continue, were not appearing not to be getting along. The fiery-haired girl was gesturing wildly and talking incessantly while the shorter teenager was glaring daggers at her and giving much terser replies. Mercury and Venus had positioned themselves off to the side of the quarrel, standing both close enough that they could potentially intervene in case the argument proceeded to blows and far enough away that they could hope that the others' ire might not spill over and be directed at them. The young man with the moniker of Jupiter had divorced himself entirely from the drama, and had turned his back on the other children to watch the Unknowns squaring off.
The debate had flared up briefly as both boy and girl had started towards one another only to be headed off by the timely intervention of the two nervous peacekeepers, and by another round of attacks by the Unknowns. Despite its bruises and cuts which the drones had captured in unfeeling detail, it was the masked Unknown, the same one which had been facing the larger kangaroo-like Unknown alone when the drones and the other children and Unknowns had arrived on the scene, that lunged suddenly and viciously at its tormentor. The larger creature seemed to have written it off completely and had thus been taken completely by surprise by the scrappy little Unknown's teeth sinking deep into the flesh and fur of its enemy's tail.
The surprised Unknown had thrashed about in order to try and dislodge the unwanted passenger clinging to its tail. All of the other Unknowns prepared to lend a hand to their battered ally, but their attention had suddenly shifted to the humans, and Ken and Eddy's attention followed theirs. The drone which was recording the teenagers had captured the greasy-haired boy whose accomplice was wrestling the larger Unknown pulling out a knife and swinging it through the air at the other children.
Without any audio in the recording, it was impossible for Ken and Eddy to know exactly what had been said, but they still saw each of the four Unknowns not currently engaged in the fight stand down. Instead, the entire group had simply watched the two monsters continue their deadly dance. The two young men with darker features had observed the fight while Mercury and Venus fidgeted uncomfortably. Mars was unable to stand still either, but she appeared to be vibrating with barely contained anger. The knuckles on her clenched fists had grown white enough to have been picked up by the drone's camera.
None of them moved even when the giant kangaroo had finally dislodged the smaller Unknown by hammering it into the ground with a powerful downward blow of its tail against the parking lot's blacktop. Even though this hit had left the black-masked Unknown dazed, it had still risen unsteadily to its feet and raised its hands so that a strange black mist could emerge from the eyes on its palms. Then, it had charged.
Without the benefit of surprise or allies, it was a foolish course of action, and the smaller creature's attack had been cut short by a swift left hook delivered by the larger Unknown's gloved fist. Crumpling to the ground, the stunned Unknown's shallow breathing had been recorded by the department's impersonal robotic observers. It had only stayed on the ground for a moment before the outmatched Unknown attempted another charge. This time, the smaller Unknown had leapt at its foe with its claws outstretched, trailing both the strange black mist from its previous attempt and an odd, slight stream of white particles that neatly blended in with the fog behind it. The only thing that its jump had added to its attempt was another dimension of failure as Ken and Eddy watched a heavy doublehanded blow from above send the desperate attacker crashing to the ground again.
All eyes on the screen and in Ken's office were on this punishing display, except for those of the teen whose Unknown was being beaten. His free hand had retrieved his white phone and his blue eyes had staring at the device's screen with what appeared to be mounting confusion.
"Odd time to be checking your phone," Eddy murmured. Though the brutality of the little Unknown's beating left a sour taste in his mouth, on the whole he was still fairly unimpressed with what the recordings were showing.
With the knife-wielding boy distracted by his phone, Mars had sprung to action. She had shouted something and broken away from the rest of the pack of humans towards the pummeled Unknown. Neither Ken nor Eddy expected much to come from Mars' display of reckless sympathy. The helmeted kangaroo had begun to pull back its fist when two dark green cords wrapped around its arm and stopped the anticipated blow.
Mars had continued to run towards the fighting Unknown with a steely look on her face until she had finally reached the smaller, clearly outmatched Unknown and had wrapped her arms around it, obscuring the black and blue form behind her gray Foo Fighters t-shirt. At first, it looked as if Mars had simply hugged the weakened monster, but when one of the robotic drones flew over to film the other side of the embracing pair, Ken and Eddy saw that the young woman had attempted to lift the Unknown to its feet, only to be met with feeble resistance. That hadn't deterred the girl, however, and Mars had continued to try and help the half-dead creature.
The sudden burst of activity from the human camp had appeared to snap the teen who had been engrossed in his phone out of his trance and he had begun shouting something, his pale face growing ruddy with anger. At about the same time, the ensnared Unknown had raised its one unencumbered arm in preparation to squash the two figures below it. Neither of these developments appeared to have been heeded by Mars. Ken and Eddy watched silently as she continued to try and pull the beaten Unknown out of danger.
As noble as the sentiment was, it did not look as if it would save the girl or the Unknown from the ignoble fate of being crushed to death by a giant kangaroo wearing boxing gloves and red rubber shoes. Before she and the Unknown she was struggling with could be crushed, the strange scene had grown stranger as the seat of Mars' pants began to glow from within with a luminous green light.
Before Eddy could ask Ken what was happening, the drones seemed to have malfunctioned as their respective feeds were abruptly filled completely with the same blazing green color. The video captured by the drone which had been trained on the Unknowns and the girl who had thrown herself into their midst came to an end. "That was when the first one died," Ken said softly.
The other drone had been working on capturing the actions and reactions of the children, but it had been forced to adjust its position to accommodate for being the only one of the department's witnesses on the scene. Only, despite its best efforts, something seemed to have broken within the drone's sturdy plastic chassis as its video was suddenly cutting in and out like some garden variety television channel instead of a jewel in the United States' arsenal of spy craft. To make matters worse, what footage had been recorded had taken on a sickly, lilting quality. But before it went offline, the ailing drone had managed to transmit something that made the importance of the video as clear as day.
What Ken and Eddy saw on the sole remaining feed was a flash of yellow and green and then the heavy glove of the bestial Unknown had struck the spot where Mars and the Unknown had been just moments before. Confusion had colored what was visible of the hulking marsupial's face, and even the dizzy drone had spun its camera around in a full circle in order to try and collect enough data that the department could figure out what it had missed.
The jerky movement of its camera and the continuing deterioration of its broadcasting capabilities meant that the robotic spy had not produced a complete panorama, but it had managed to capture the stunned faces of four humans and three Unknowns. It had also gotten a shot of a tall, lanky green creature holding Mars and the injured Unknown in its long arms. This new monster's head appeared to be a perfectly round yellow circle surrounded by a ring of darker yellow petals. Under a pink forehead were two beady black eyes and a fanged mouth set in a decidedly neutral expression.
With that last image, the weathered drone had finally given up the ghost and the last video went dark.
Neither of the men sitting in the office said anything for a whole minute, each of them processing what they had just seen. After he thought that the thinking had stretched on for long enough, Eddy cleared his throat and asked Ken, "What was that?"
"An Unknown," came Ken's reply. "The real question is, where did it come from?"
"Another emergence?"
"In the same location and appearing within minutes of each other? Doubtful, don't you think?"
Eddy chewed this over, but only for the moment before a counterargument came to mind. "But didn't we pick up a second spike of energy around the same time that we lost the drones this morning? Aside from the magnitude of the spike it had all of the markers of an emergence from wherever these things are coming from."
"You're neglecting one key piece of the puzzle, Eddy," the director gently chided as he rewound the video back to the image of three Unknowns marveling at the aftermath of whatever had occurred during the flash of green light. "Notice anything here?"
The more heavyset bureaucrat's eyes roamed over the picture on the screen and each creature; the black dinosaur, the white serpent, the blue bird. "One of them is missing."
Ken nodded once and then rose to his feet, locking the monitor as he did so. "Our work continues."
Before the director could leave the office, Eddy asked Ken another question, "Where are you going, Ken?"
Without giving Eddy the courtesy of so much as a single backwards glance, the taller man coldly replied, "It looks like I need to have another look at our specimen downstairs."
Ken left Eddy to sit alone with the shiver that ran down his spine. Still, as his boss had said, there was work to be done. The portly man started back towards his own office, already brainstorming ideas for how to justify losing two drones to the higherups in Washington.