The house, beside us, continued to fall apart, the rear side of it crumbling into the pit. We heard sirens echoing across the hills—the helicopters who had come to survey the damage stalked closer and closer. Eventually, one of the terrible steel birds arrived to where we were, and floated above the house, descending upon us and kicking up clouds of dust. I shielded my eyes, and shook, wanting to scream and yell and curse the invading machine. To be fair, it was terrifying in the mushroom language, for the mushrooms had no sense of how to describe it. I felt myself tempted to launch a strike of purple lightning at the invader and it's strange heretical magic. But I did not, since the dominant, English part of my brain still recognized, ultimately, that there were people in that helicopter, and that they shouldn't be struck by lightning.
But still, I hated the thing. All of us hated the thing. It was a monster made of pure noise and metal, reeking of exhaust fumes, turning the earth into a hurricane, slowly churning and chopping until it landed in the field with its long dancing blades; an olive green helicopter with dark tinted window eyes that seemed to grin sadistically at me, Gerry, and his family. All of us formed a huddled mass of crying, beshroomed faces—to gain some sense of composure, I withdrew all of us gently from the mushroom language, and unsteadily brought myself to stand onto my own two legs. I faced the helicopter and tried to make sense of it. But still, it was a machine. A dead creature without language—its intentions uncertain. Within, I could feel minds observing the people in the field with a callous and numb ecstasy, mixed with wordless layers of astonished fear. A pair of other helicopters passed overhead, and made a ring around the sinkhole. Far away, I could discern trucks on the horizon, coming towards us, their intentions unknown.
From out of the helicopter, stepped a woman, a short and slender African American woman with a touchscreen tablet in her hands, a barely perceptible light coming off of her skin. I rubbed my eyes, thinking it a hallucination, but no, the aura was still there, a color that straddled the space between violet and ultraviolet, peeling off of her skin and into the atmosphere around her. Shutting her eyes, the woman gave off a pulse of invisible light, before turning to a man inside of the helicopter. “Get him help. I think he had a fall.”, she commanded, studying all of us with suspicion and mystified curiosity. Her mind danced between English and an extension of that language I did not recognize nor comprehend, a language of numbers and letters that fluttered about like loose paper, and came together in a mass of cobwebs in which all she saw could be captured, known, and dissected effortlessly. But even that had its limitations. The physics she now confronted differed vastly from the Earthly physics she had learned so well.
She keyed her attention onto me, her eyes shifting in color and her aura fluctuating in its brightness as she assessed what had happened to me. I froze still, feeling all of the secret workings of organs and enzymes and molecules and particles become mapped and charted, stretching the boundaries of her language and her cognition. Gulping, she looked down at the tablet, scrawling a note. I didn’t see what she wrote—but I felt that as she wrote it down, her nerves shivered with the realization that our minds wore clothes cut from the same cloth. The woman came towards me uncertainly, a mystified fear welling up from inside of her spine as she cautiously drafted the words she might speak in her mind. “My name is Dr. Whitebalm”, she introduced herself, “I'm here to help you. Are you okay?”
“Okay?”, I repeated, “Alright. Okay, I mean. Fine. Good. Doing well. Yourself? You? How are you?”
Squinting at the bizarre, chanting quality of my voice, Whitebalm studied me closer, trying to produce a magnetic fingerprint of my brain. She saw that it was alive with activity.
“Are you—under the influence of any drugs?”
“I—I—[long pause]“, I stumbled as I stopped myself from shouting at her defiantly, “I am the influence of drugs, lady”, and I nodded, not yet trusting her. She was a scientist after all, and I had become her project almost immediately. A knowing silence fell between us.
“Have you been by the sleeper yet?” (ONE OF THE NURSES)
“No, I’ve been busy over here.” (ANOTHER)
“There’s something weird about him.”
“Well yeah, have you seen his vitals?”
“No, no, no. Whenever I walk by him, it’s like I—I—I don’t know how to explain it. He’s—“
“Don’t get too paranoid, Jane. You’re just getting superstitious.”
“Don’t you think it’s strange that they—“, Jane looked back over her shoulder to see that I was listening to their whispers. The other nurse raised her eyebrows at her, smirking at her for being so careless.
I wanted to see John—but I hadn’t been allowed to get up from my station. They had taken us all to a line of tents, a field hospital set up in a manic frenzy to evacuate anyone who had been effected by the disaster. Doctors paced the halls like white, frenzied ghosts with grey, pistol shaped radiation detectors, scrawling frantic notes as nurses read our vital signs and asked us penetrating and enveloping questions about our diets, our prescriptions, and our medical conditions. “What did you see?”, I was asked more times than I could count, by soldiers I knew to be only dressed as doctors. “Nothing”, I responded in as many ways as I could tear from the depths of the English language. Though the tongue still felt a cage, I kept myself there, intent on sheltering the secrets of the mushrooms from these strangers. The scene was so manic it bordered on absurd. Various ranks of soldiers and stern looking men advised all of the unwitting patients that someone had been building what they suspected was a dirty bomb in the area—but with the exception of a few, they all knew they were lying. Once the doctors discerned that this or that person had not been exposed to the radiation, they allowed them to leave—the press corps waited for them, bombarding them immediately with questions. All responses almost certainly matched the official narrative.
An eerie quiet came about the tent once the screenings had concluded, accompanied only by a faint wind blowing over the canvas roof. I sat up in my bed, bored with the terror of this frenzied scene, and looked over to the table, where the nurse had left a chart, and I studied my own vital signs with a disinterested glare. My heart rate 72. My blood pressure 130 over 84. My insulin was alright. I was a 21 year old female, exposed to....critical levels of the stuff, whatever it was, not that I cared anymore.
_________
NARRATOR: Hours pass, until, around mid-afternoon, the last of the patients have left, and only those exposed to significant amounts of radiation remain. With every second, Meagan grows more and more uncertain about what is going on.
Dr. Whitebalm sat crosslegged next to a man in a digital camoflauge uniform, which in the light seemed to squirm with invisible caterpillars. I was directly across from them, studying the creases in their eyelids and the movements of their hands to try and trace the trajectory of their minds, to anticipate what was to come for the sake of my own survival. Vivid images of firing squads and cruel experiments shot between the neurons in my brain—I could not tell for certain if I were reading their minds, or just anxious as shit. Everything was a giant fucking trip and I was fucking done with it. How long had it been? Four hours? Six hours? I was done with it, however fucking long it had been. But it wasn’t wearing off any time soon—and enough time spent in this English language had left me cynically aware of all of its edges, all the colors it could not describe, all the emotions its grammar and vocabulary had paved over since its inception, all the paradoxes and contradictions behind my every thought, the meaningless of everything. These alien faces gave me something to cling to at the very least, perpetuating the idea of uncovering some deep secret, but I knew even if I did, it would do fuck all for anyone. The futility of this eventually got to me, and I chose, between terror and paranoia, blatant indifference.
“Are we gonna go around the circle and introduce ourselves or something? I’m too fucking drunk for this.”, asked one man.
Dr. Whitebalm shot him an icy and penetrating glare. “Sure, we can go ahead and do that. It might make this a little less scary for everyone, don’t you think colonel?”
“Sure.”, the colonel said with an indifference that rivaled my own. I wrinkled my nose at him, gritting my teeth. Asshole. You think you’re indifferent? I’ll show you, I thought to myself, shutting my eyes briefly in order to embrace the void within so that I could uncover new and exciting ways to be completely indifferent.
“My name is Dr. Whitebalm and I am a quantum physicist at Texas A&M attached to the DoD's Deep Space Exploration Initiative.”
“Fuck man, am I gonna be an astronaut or some shit?” (Asked the drunk man)
“If you could manage to be quiet while we do this, it would be more than appreciated.”
(Drunk man scoffs)
I sighed at the drunk man, envious of his numbness, a numbness which enveloped him. The language in his head was one of death, fermentation, unfeeling nihilism which I could not hope to grasp nearly so well. A stumbling anaesthesia, through which words could hardly penetrate. The chemical cocktail in his brain came from a richness that had decayed over an ineffably long time and now lingered in a dead, crackling fire. Shutting my eyes, the entity made itself known to me. A wispy, consuming flame, unthinking and unfeeling. I opened my eyes again, in sadness, the apathy around me crumbling. I loved these people. I wanted to love them. I did not want to be indifferent to their pain, no matter how pointless I felt it was to care for them.
“I am Colonel Imes, I am the head of the military side of that project.”
Gerry, wincing with pain, cleared his throat. “My name’s uhm. Gerry Parker. I’m a…uhm, I take care of some cows. Play the mandolin. Love Donald Trump, Jesus Christ and good American bluegrass music.”
“And I’m Cassandra. Also a proud Christian. Proud American. Thank you for your service.”
Dr. Whitebalm eyed her up and down, a faint smile briefly visible on her cheeks as their eyes met. “Nice to meet you both. And who are you?”, she asked to the eldest child. “I’m Gerry junior. I like Minecraft.”
“Jessica. I'm reading Charlie Bones.”
“Peter. I'm in fifth grade and she's my mom.”
All eyes in the room now turned to me. I took a very deep breath and opened my mouth. “Myself—Me—personally—I—--Myself--My name—is—Meagan. I—am—[very fast] feeling very anxious about all this.”, I managed, looking down in embarrassment. The other two introduced themselves next—a pale and unhappy looking woman with raggedy hair and frenzed eyes who was named Maureen. She worked as a librarian at the public library. Then the drunk guy named Bobby who loudly asked if Maureen was supposed to be a boys name and then slurred something about the Dallas cowboys, the government and how bad his head hurt.
Satisfied that we had all introduced ourselves, and quickly beginning to forget all of our name, Colonel Imes crossed his hands and began to debrief us, “Dr. Whitebalm and I have decided to use a policy of full disclosure with you. Dr. Whitebalm is working with us on—well I’m sure she could explain it much better than I could”, he said, as he knew absolutely nothing about what Dr. Whitebalm was studying apart from the fact that she received tons and tons government money every year in order to study it. He cleared his throat, probably thinking he did that so smoothly, even though he did not, “At about one PM today, an energetic anomaly appeared over the Topaz Hills neighborhood, leading Dr. Whitebalm to conduct an test of a device intended to measure and understand these anomalies, which we suspected may have a great deal to do with—“, he tried to remember what Dr. Whitebalm had told him, but he did not remember any of it, and was too embarrassed by this fact to ask her to explain it to them, “Some of the things at work with deep space exploration. Unexpectedly, the anomaly rapidly intensified, creating a burst of energy which created a sinkhole in the fragile limestone rock on which the Topaz Hills neighborhood was built, save a few homes built on exposed granite.”, he said, proud that he had managed to remember at least one mangled fragment of something Dr. Whitebalm had told him. His more well-informed counterpart took over for him. “It is difficult to explain to laypeople. I was also exposed to similar amounts of this radiation as all of you, and from what we can tell it is essentially non-lethal. That doesn’t mean that it has no effect, however. We need to monitor all of you in order to be sure you are safe”
“What exactly does that entail?”, asked Maureen, clutching her arms over her stomach as her anxiety crept up on her.
“You'll just be with us for a little bit. Due to the very secretive nature of our work, we need to keep you out of the public eye. We will provide you with housing, accommodations, and medical care free of charge for two weeks until we can be certain that you will not develop complications. Once you are released, you will sign a non-disclosure agreement, walk away, and forget everything you may have seen or heard about the Deep Space Exploration Initiative or the Horizon One Base.”
“So this is a coverup. All of this, that’s why you’re telling everyone it was a dirty bomb, that’s why you’re keeping us with you.”
“Yes, it is a cover up. You can look at it that way. But bear in mind, even though this is a purely scientific endeavor, the technology we are developing is capable of leveling a medium-sized city if it falls into the wrong hands, as you all have just seen. Maybe worse. But if it succeeds—if it succeeds, we would be leading the way with exploring the entire known universe. Manned missions to Mars, the moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn. Other galaxies, even. If you let us work with you, you could be saving astronauts lives from whatever you’ve been affected by today.”
“But we don’t have a choice, do we?”
Dr. Whitebalm winced, studying Maureen carefully, to dissect her brain and body. Everything, outwardly, seemed normal. But she wasn’t sure she could trust it. Only I seemed to have been impacted as profoundly as she had, but there was no way of knowing for sure.
“I—now. Maureen, you seem like a very intelligent woman, and I'm sure that you can--”
“No, no you do not have a choice. This is a matter of national security.”, interrupted the colonel. Maureen seemed to understand, at least outwardly. National security, after all, was at stake.
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