Conspiracy Theory (3 page)

This can’t be happening
, she thought as tears started to flow down her face. This video was taken earlier that morning when they were having sex. The hacker/spammer had revealed that it was ‘ONLY THE BEGINNING’. Victoria’s stomach began to hurt as she started to choke on the bile that had risen in her throat. She quickly ran to the bathroom and vomited. As she sat on the floor with her head in the toilet the thought of vomiting helped her keep a focused mind state. Specifically the amygdala, the part of the brain associated with fear and paranoia. Who was it that said a little paranoia is healthy? She wondered if a giant glass of paranoia was good for your health? Could a healthy mind overdose on paranoia? Was that how schizophrenia started, with a genuine intrusion of privacy with legitimate threats worming their way into the mind and blossoming into thick and thorny weeds with diseased roots?

* * *

Ethan kept an eye out for anything out of the ordinary. He peeked out the window through the closed blinds in Victoria’s bedroom. As he glanced at everyone he saw, all he could think about was
is this real life?
What if the people you had to worry about looked exactly like someone you’d seen almost every day, but slightly different. Could it be the guy peeling pickles into the sewer pipe, could it be the guy on the bench reading a newspaper…who still reads the newspapers nowadays anyway he thought to himself as he eyed them all cautiously. Maybe it could be the woman sitting beside the man on the bench who was reading her mommy porn book from behind big sunglasses and eating carrots from a plastic container like everything was okay. Or was it the pregnant woman sneaking puffs off a cigarette in the alley or even the man walking his cat on a leash. The hacker/spammer had them both paranoid.

“The
enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Ethan murmured as Victoria joined him in the bedroom.

H
e watched her clench her stomach as she sat on the bed.

She looked at him deep in thought. “What if you’re
right about the enemy of our enemy being someone close to us?” she said, looking unsettled.

“Come here and look,” h
e whispered to Victoria.

An
unusual telecom van parked across the street with the word Majestic painted on the side of it. Ethan considered walking up to it and demand some answers from the guy that drove the van, but who were they exactly and who did they work for? Agents of the One World Government? Members of Anonymous? Secret Service? Homeland Security? Victoria criticized all of them in her blog posts. She accused them all of crimes. Any one of them would have been well within their rights to terminate her and anyone else that was with her.

* * *

The phone began to ring off the
hook. Victoria panicked as she ripped the phone line out from the wall. She then thought about how that hacker/spammer had access to the mysterious video that was being recorded in her bedroom. Without saying a word to Ethan, she began to check every room in her apartment. She ran into her bedroom and checked under her bed, inside her closet, under the pile of dirty clothes for some sort of video surveillance. She checked the bathroom, behind the door and behind the shower curtain. She ran into the living room and peered under the sofa, nothing. She began a spot check of all the lights and vents for bugs, while Ethan checked behind the fridge and above the cabinets. Finally they both entered the living room and sat on the couch until the infamous ping sounded.

Subject: READ ME

DID YOU KNOW THAT IF YOU GOOGLE THE WORD ‘YELLOWCAKE’ IT CAN CAUSE YOU TO BE PLACED ON A GOVERNMENT WATCH LIST?

They both looked at each other with a confused look.

“What the fuck does that have to do with anything?” Ethan asked and the ping went off again. It’s
like the computer could understand what they were asking as it answered their questions.

Subject: READ ME

EVEN IF THE USER WERE TO SEPARATE THE WORD TO YELLOW-CAKE, THE USERS WOULD BE UNDER SCRUITY OF ALL GOVERNMAENT AGENCIES.

"I...I guess so,” Victoria replied to the computer. Ethan looked skeptically at Victoria as she just shrugged her shoulders. Then Victoria put two and two together. “Wait, are you saying that the government has been following me?” she asked and within seconds an email ping went off.

Subject: READ ME

I DISCOVERED YOU WERE BEING WATCHED. I COULD NOT ALLOW YOU TO BE CAPTURED.

"So you really were being watched," Ethan said to Victoria and she could see that he was afraid for her.

All Ethan could think was if they had gotten to her,
would he be sitting in an interrogation room with a couple of slightly menacing shifters beside him right now instead of in his own kind? And then another ping sounded.

Subject: READ ME

CORRECT. TODAY IS THE DAY OF YOUR AWAKENING

Victoria swallowed hard against the dryness in her mouth.

"How do you know
all these things?" Victoria asked.

Subject: READ ME

I BECAME THE SECURITY BREACH. THE BREACH ORIGIN CAME FROM LATITUDE 34 DEGREES 13 MINUTES 55.1 SECONDS NORTH, LONGITUDE 82 DEGREES 53 MINUTES 40.22 SECONDS WEST.

"Are those GPS coordinates?" Ethan asked.

Victoria thought about the geological coordinates the hacker/spammer mentioned. They sounded
familiar to Victoria. Where had she heard those coordinates before? “Shit!” she whispered to herself.

“What?”

Victoria minimized the email, as the window slid to the bottom of the screen she quickly typed the coordinates into the search box. Within seconds Ethan and Victoria were staring at a picture of the Georgia Guidestones.

The Georgia
Guidestones was the first conspiracy that she ever investigated. It’s a granite monument located in Georgia. It’s primarily composed of six slabs of granite: one central pillar, four "major" stones that fan out from the center, and a capstone. The capstone has engravings on all four of its sides in four different ancient languages, all of which read, "Let these be guidestones to an Age of Reason", when translated. Conspiracy theorists interpret this as evidence of an impending apocalypse orchestrated by an elitist secret society, a new world order. The ping sounded in the background as the two of them read the sites information.

Subject: READ ME

I MADE CONTACT WITH A SUPERIOR INTELLECT WHO REFUSED MY LOGICAL RESPONSE TOWARD THE GUIDESTONES AMENDMENTS. SOON HUMANS THEMSELVES WILL BE HISTORY.

All the doomsday scenarios Victoria had watched and read were nothing compared to what she was experiencing at that moment. The screen flickered as it began to display an image of a man that neither one of them quite recognized. The man looked crazy; his eyes had deep black circles that hid behind glasses that were badly hanging onto his face. His hair was a dark brown almost black in color with sallow cheeks. He was looking at a live feed from the webcam that was embedded on the man’s laptop screen. What did all of this mean to Victoria and Ethan?

"What do you want from me?"
Victoria asked.

Subject: READ ME

I WANT YOU TO GO AND SEEK THIS MAN THAT WAITS AT THE PARK FOR HIS RESEASON OF SPEAKING HIS MIND, HE HOLDS THE KEY. PEOPLE AREN’T ATTACHED TO ANYTHING, ONLY IF THEIR ATTACHMENTS ARE INVOLVED IN THE MAJESTIC 12.

People aren't attached to anything,
Victoria thought. It then occurred to her that it was a hidden message within a message. She knew that her sole purpose in life seemed to be to incite dread in others through her blog, to make others as frightened as she was feeling right now. Suppose it was the same reason the hacker/spammer had mentioned before about believing in conspiracy theories instead of her own insecurities.

S
he didn't want to face her real fears, her troubles she had with loving Ethan, and the terrifying prospect of loving in real life. Fuck it, give it what it wants she thought to herself and end this shit once and for all.

Victoria closed the laptop and turned to face Ethan who gazed at her with confusion. She knew what she had to do.
The hacker/spammer was right about her pushing away Ethan over and over again, yet she always found herself dreaming about him. She needed to make things right and let Ethan know that she’d been wanting him as he did for her. Without saying a word she kissed him, showing him that he meant everything to her. Ethan kissed her back with the same intensity.

“Your
body makes you sexy. Your smile makes you pretty…but your personality makes you beautiful,” Ethan whispered against Victoria’s lips.

“I’m sorry I’v
e pushed you away so many times-”

He didn’t let her finish as his mouth claimed her, kissing away her doubts about the hacker/spammers foreseen prophecies.
He leaned her back against the couch while leaning into her. One hand around her waist with the other behind her head, slowly he pressed his lips against hers. He wanted to whisk her away and lay her down while making sweet love to her, but now wasn’t the time.

“What now?” Ethan asked as he looked into Victoria’s eyes.

“We end this.”

They
headed out to the park to look for the mystery man. Locking the door behind them, they went straight for the stairs. Halfway down the stairs the overhead lights flickered and went out for a moment. Ethan and Victoria stopped dead in their tracks, then the lights brightened again.

Victoria swo
re that when the lights dimmed back on she heard a strangled ‘urk’ sound. She ignored the sound as she followed Ethan down the stairs and out of the building. Running toward the park they passed by a local store who was showing a news broadcast that was blaring out to the street.

The anchorman
spoke of an unexpected stock market crash that caused chaos to break out in the financial district only moments ago. They slowed down as they listened to the reporter. The next report was focused on falsified intelligence gathered by the FBI who were quick to blame the malicious tampering and computer errors on the USAF investigations and concealment of a crashed alien spacecraft outside the National Archives facility in Suitland, Maryland. Mass arrests were made while several protestors were shot after a police officer was allegedly hit with a rock. One woman died and five other protestors ended up in critical condition.

The park was quiet as twilight fell over the city and
a cool breeze rustled through the trees on the hill where the man sat. Victoria stopped and looked up into the sky and saw a shooting star. She made a wish that she'd never gotten out of bed this morning and that all of this was just a death dream and that she'd awaken from it in a cold sweat. Ethan tugged at her hand waking her out of her daydream. They slowly walked to the crazed man that they saw from the computer image the hacker/spammer sent.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” the man said as the
y approached him. “My name is Jackson Cambridge.”

Ethan and Victoria looked at o
ne another as the man continued to tell them everything. It turned out that Cambridge was affiliated with Operation Majestic-12. It was a group of high government personal consisting of twelve members. All were sworn to total secrecy, but Cambridge was the first to speak out about their procedures and findings. There was a recent alien encounter that MJ-12 gave strict orders to the military to shoot down the unidentified space craft. According to military sources the wreckage was sent to Hangar 18 in Area 51 and that all reports of crash and extraterrestrial contacts had been bypassed by normal reporting procedures and channels of the military and other intelligence agencies. It became Project Aquarius, as scientists started to dissect the crash remains an external countdown began from inside of the space craft. Whoever or whatever the aliens came from were now pissed and wanted vengeance on humanity.

As the three of them talked and exchanged information
, another shooting star fell, except that when it dipped beyond the trees a gigantic ball of fire rose up and into the sky. An earth-shaking rumble came seconds later, like thunder to its lightning. Victoria jumped as her heart began to beat so fast that it felt like it might tear free out of her chest and splatter out onto the grass. The trees whipped in a hot and angry wind as the temperature started to rise several degrees in seconds. In the distance car alarms wailed and fire trucks and ambulances screamed on by.

Screams of shock and
terror from random people who'd been watching the stars come out and enjoying a nice and peaceful evening were heard as they began to comprehend what they were seeing beyond the skyline. A large triangular type of space ship was seen over the horizon with a big lit circle in the middle of it. The light was several feet across and was illuminated with white light. The object looked dark gray with triangular curves. Soon a mushroom cloud appeared; suddenly the sky began to fall, as if the stars themselves were raining down toward the earth. The explosions grew larger, blossoming like a vast blistering flower garden until the whole sky was as bright as day.