Odd Interlude Part Two (8 page)

Anyway, Mr. Mystery isn’t human, and his name isn’t Mr. Mystery. The scientists at Wyvern called him Aladdin, after one of the heroes in
The Thousand and One Nights
. The original Aladdin was able to summon genies from his magic lamp, to do his bidding. Now that I know what this guy is, I sort of understand the half-baked logic of calling him that, but Aladdin himself doesn’t get it. He dislikes the name. He calls himself Ed.

According to Ed, Fort Wyvern in its prime wasn’t just an army base. Like maybe 5,000 of its 134,000 acres were set aside for all kinds of highly classified spooky projects that weren’t under the control of the army, that were run instead by who knows who and were funded from the federal government’s “black budget,” so they always had more money than Scrooge McDuck, and they could go as crazy as they wanted.

This place I’ve been exploring has nothing to do with Project Aladdin. This is where they worked on Project Polaris. Just so you know, Polaris is the last star in the handle of the Little Dipper, if it matters. Personally, I think everything matters, even when it doesn’t seem to.

Project Polaris was built to study alien artifacts, by which I don’t mean things that were brought across the borders from Canada and Mexico. Like ten years earlier, this satellite was conducting geological surveys and searching for possible oil deposits when it identified a ginormous unnatural mass not far off the
coast of California. Navy divers were sent down there, and they discovered a crashed but still watertight flying saucer, although according to Ed, the thing was less like a saucer than it was like a flying wok with an upside-down custard cup where the lid handle should have been and with powdered-sugar dredgers where the bowl handles should have been, which frankly I can’t quite picture.

As you might imagine, the government was hot to study this historic find, so they paid a two-billion-dollar bonus in advance to the security-cleared contractor—he was the husband of a senator—to finish this underground facility in one year. By then, Fort Wyvern had been closed a long time and housed no military personnel, but its isolation made it an even more suitable location for deep-black projects. Because of the reckless pace of construction, three times as many workmen died on the job as had died in accidents during the building of Hoover Dam. Some were crushed, some were blown up, some were run down by machinery, some were skewered or beheaded, some were electrocuted. One guy died during an argument with a union boss, when he fell into the excavation for a footing and was drowned in twenty tons of concrete. According to Ed, all of the dead were buried at the government’s expense and were presented with a posthumous medal for something or other. Their spouses and children received lifetime passes granting free admission to all national parks, plus a 23 percent discount on refreshments and souvenirs purchased therein.

Anyway, one of the weird artifacts taken from the alien ship and hauled here to Wyvern with bust-your-gut difficulty is the silvery sphere that I can see now through the big windows of this observation room.

Dr. Norris Hiskott has nothing to do with the sphere. He worked in another part of this facility, studying the bodies of the crew of the flying-wok thing. He was super-interested in their DNA. As anyone would expect—anyone but the government, I guess—something went just horribly wrong, and the ETs’ genetic material somehow began to sneak into Dr. Hiskott’s body, with him not even aware of it for a while. You have to wonder if some highly educated people are really as smart as they’re supposed to be.

So one day Hiskott is working in his lab with two assistants who must have been just as brilliant as he was, and suddenly three of his fingernails drop off, as if they were glued on and the glue went bad. Everyone is startled, and as an assistant picks up one of the nails, another nail drops off, then two more, then the last four, it’s like raining fingernails. And now in the tips of Dr. Hiskott’s fingers, you can barely see where the nail beds once were. I mean, there’s no depressions for them, and the skin is smoothing out almost before everyone’s eyes. Finally those Harvard educations begin to pay off when these three scientists all make the connection between what just happened to Hiskott and the fact that the dead ETs they’re studying don’t have fingernails.

Ed, previously known as Aladdin, doesn’t describe things in the juicy detail you might wish. It’s just
not in his nature to be super dramatic, but I bet you can imagine, as I sure can, the panic that gripped those three guys in that lab. Their wing is hermetically sealed to begin with, and you go in and out through a decontamination chamber, but now one of Hiskott’s assistants says they have to pull the alarm switch, lock down the lab, and call an emergency closed-circuit video conference with everyone else on Project Polaris. The other assistant agrees, and so does Hiskott—but then he surprises them, attacks them, slicing deep with a long-bladed scalpel he’d used in the dissection of the aliens, slashing their carotid arteries, and they’re done for in like twelve seconds flat. All this is captured by the in-lab cameras that record all procedures for posterity or whatever.

Whether Dr. Norris Hiskott was always your average mad scientist or whether he was driven wacko by the alien DNA that got into his brain, who can say? Maybe it’s a little of both. So what he does then is, he cleans the blood off his hands, strips off his smock, leaves through the decontamination chamber, and drives out of Wyvern. When he gets to his house in Moonlight Bay, he right away strangles his wife to death, we don’t know if because she noticed he didn’t have fingernails or if maybe because he was undergoing some even weirder change that would explain why he wore a hoodie when he checked in to the Harmony Corner motor court. Maybe they had a lousy marriage, he wouldn’t help her wash the dishes or put out the trash, that kind of thing, and she nagged him, and he wanted to strangle her for years, and now he had nothing to lose, so he did it.

Meanwhile, for more than three years, the investigation of the mysterious sphere had gotten nowhere. The thing just floated there, resisting all schemes to open it or discover its purpose. Then in the three days before Norris Hiskott goes missing and especially on the afternoon he splits the scene, major creepy things begin happening in that wing of Project Polaris where they keep the sphere. People are spontaneously levitating around it. The hands on wristwatches spin so fast that watchworks begin to smoke. One balding scientist grows his hair back in like six minutes and looks twenty years younger than when he came to work that day. People are having vivid visions of disturbing landscapes that exist nowhere on Earth. On the computer monitors, the faces of dead friends and relatives of the project staff appear, screaming for help and shrieking vicious lies about the living whom they address.

So now, just when Hiskott is fleeing Wyvern, the thing that I call Orc—which doesn’t resemble the other ETs—sort of manifests out of the side of the sphere and nearly escapes, killing the six members of a SWAT team that tries to capture it. Orc is isolated in the long yellow corridor, where it’s promptly gassed and then cooked into a juiceless mummy by intense streams of microwaves.

So then the unknown high muckety-mucks who oversee this Project Polaris decide they should
evacuate all personnel, lock down the entire facility, and keep it locked until a study of their findings to date might suggest a safer way to proceed with both the alien cadavers and the artifacts. Do you think? Sheesh. Because everyone agrees it’s too dangerous to allow any people into the facility, the monitoring of events inside—if any—will be conducted exclusively by the subject of another massive black-budget program, Aladdin of Project Aladdin, now known to me as Ed.

Get this: As it turns out, Ed is an artificial intelligence, AI for short, who exists inside an array of God-only-knows-how-many linked Cray supercomputers in another underground building in Wyvern. He is self-aware and all, maybe not to the degree or in the same sense that people are self-aware, though he’s a major big success for the scientists who developed him. Ed—he doesn’t mind being called Eddie—is a
benign
artificial intelligence, which he keeps stressing. The main proof of his peaceful nature is, he’s warned his inventors that if they refine his design any further, to increase his cognitive powers and his capacity for emotion, there will be a 91.5 percent chance that he’ll be compelled to seize control of the World Wide Web and escape to the Internet, where he can exist even if the Crays are shut off. My buddy Ed says there’s then a 98.6 percent likelihood that he will thereafter assume control of the power grid plus all electronic systems and devices everywhere on Earth, even including military satellites and nuclear-weapons systems. He says he would do so not for the purpose of exterminating humanity, because after all, he bears us no ill will. We’ve been nice to him. We’re all like his mom and dad. He would take control instead to reorder our civilization so that it would be a lot more efficient, more just, and altogether a lot more fun, though he does admit he has a pretty shaky idea of exactly what is fun and what isn’t.

I’m like pretty darn happy to tell you, his developers take his warning seriously and agree to maintain Ed at his current level of complexity. When sometime later everything blows up here in Project Polaris, everyone agrees Ed is the ideal—in fact the only—“person” to be trusted to monitor events inside the facility through its cameras and other electronic systems. Go figure. But he’s been doing that now for five years, a sort of remote night watchman who doesn’t need coffee and doughnuts, a well-meaning ghost in the machine, and during that time, nothing unsettling happens with the nasty alien cadavers or their artifacts.

As for Ed and me: During my early explorations of the outer reaches of Project Polaris, Ed decided not to tattle on me because, although the controls had failed on the first three doors long before I pried them open, he could still hold the fourth door shut against all my efforts to violate it. Watching me in the yellow hallway with Orc, he finds me intriguing, I don’t know why, except that this job he’s held for the last five years must be as boring as snot.

Then suddenly here I come with Harry, and Harry and I start talking about Dr. Hiskott and all, so
Ed’s ears prick up, or whatever he has that’s the equivalent of ears. The FBI and the NSA have been searching high and low for Hiskott all these five years, but they haven’t found a trace of him because they never think to look next door in Harmony Corner. Now that Ed knows where Hiskott is, you might think he’d clue in the
federales
, but he’s not ready to do that yet.

Sitting in an office chair in the observation room, I ask him why he doesn’t make the call, and he says, “I have evolved a pleasant affection for you, Jolie Ann Harmony.”

“I like you, too, Ed. But, gee, having a platoon of FBI guys come in and blow the crap out of Hiskott—that would be the best.”

“Thus far, I have thought of one hundred and six ways that such an operation could go wrong, resulting in the deaths of most members of your family.”

“Not good, Ed.”

“I have just thought of the hundred and eighth. Ninth.”

“I guess you never stop thinking, huh?”

“It’s what I do. The hundred and tenth. Even if all members of your family were to survive, you’ll be quarantined here at Wyvern.”

“Quarantine is for diseased people or something.”

“They will suspect your entire family of being contaminated with alien DNA.”

If I ever wondered what it might feel like to have a live eel squirming around in my stomach—which actually isn’t anything I have wondered, but supposing I did—well, right when I hear the words
contaminated with alien DNA
, I know the feeling
vividly
.

“Ed, be straight with me. Might we be contaminated?”

“I think that possibility is slight, Jolie Ann Harmony.”

From behind the dead control console, gazing out into the sphere room, I watch the witchy shadows leap and spin through the terrible red light beyond the veined rock-crystal windows of the artifact—if it actually is rock crystal, and if they are windows.

“How slight?” I ask Ed.

“I lack the knowledge of alien biology that would allow me to make such a calculation with confidence. But I do not believe that Dr. Norris Hiskott became contaminated simply by close contact with the ETs. Evidence exists to suggest that Dr. Hiskott determined that the aliens removed from the sunken vessel were not dead but in a state of suspended animation, that he isolated what he believed to be alien stem cells of some particular function, and that he secretly injected himself with these stem cells because he was
convinced that he would thereby greatly increase his intelligence and longevity.”

“Good grief. Was he a nut or something?”

“Everyone considered for a position in Project Polaris had to go through exhaustive psychological testing before reporting to work. Dr. Hiskott was diagnosed as afflicted with narcissism, which is intense self-love, and megalomania, which is delusions of grandeur and an obsession with doing grand things. He was also found to suffer from occasional periods of depersonalization, which is a state of feeling unreal, accompanied by derealization, which is a state of feeling that the world is not real, though these never lasted longer than two or three hours.”

“So he
was
a total nut, but they hired him anyway?”

From his cozy nest of Cray supercomputers in a distant building, Ed reassures me: “None of his conditions is a psychosis. They are all neuroses or mild personality disorders that do not necessarily interfere with a scientist’s work. In Dr. Hiskott’s case, his peers nationwide were in almost unanimous agreement that he was one of the most brilliant men in his field. Furthermore, his brother-in-law is a United States senator.”

“Okay, well,” I say, “no one in my family
injected
himself with alien blood or anything, so how long will the FBI quarantine us?”

“Forever.”

“Don’t you think that’s a teeny-weeny littlest-bit extreme?”