Ever Been Hypnotized?
A serial story for JWD! I'll be writing it in several parts, and in fact I don't actually know how many parts there'll be yet. Hope you guys enjoy it...it's about time I started posting something a tad meatier than my recent threads
Part 1
Sunlight poured down onto the roof of the small, neatly-mowed lawn attached to the lovely Portland style home that overlooked it. Not too flashy, but hardly rundown, this was the home of the Spooner family. Nestled at the bottom of a road with the nearest home several miles away, the house was very secluded, with a high white fence separating it from the other homes, making it's garden difficult to see from the street.
Late afternoon was kind to the house, making it's white walls take on a softer, redder colour than normal, an almost romantic effect. Indeed, the afternoon would have been a perfect one, bedecked with the scent of roses and newly-mown grass, had it not been for the fact that a tear-drop shaped metallic object weighing several tons and about the size of a small car plowed into garden of the house after a screaming descent through the thicker region of the atmosphere.
Jenna didn't know what had happened. A moment ago she had been busy serving her family's early dinner, for tonight was a Meeting Night after all, and they had to eat at half past 5 to make the meeting, which started at 7PM, on the dot. As she was placing the peas down in the center of the modest dinner table, a strange sort of screaming noise, almost like a jumbo jet flying over, only deeper, so deep that it seemed to resonate in the center of your chest cavity, had started up.
Maybe it's one of those military jets that have been flying around so much since 9/11 she thought to herself, and as she was about to scoop some peas out for little Jimmy, the noise had reached a horrifying crescendo. She was sure that Armageddon had arrived! With the entire house shaking and her heart pounding in sympathy, she screamed with her children as her husband shouted "DOWN! EVERYBODY GET DOWN!"
When it seemed as if the screaming noise couldn't possibly get any louder and her ears were beginning to hurt from it, it suddenly stopped, ending with an almighty explosion that happened very close to the back porch. All the dishes were thrown off the table, which was itself hurled across the kitchen, along with the family that had been sitting at it a minute ago. There was broken glass everywhere, and she could smell acrid, burning grass and other, stranger fumes coming from the back garden. The sudden silence struck like a hammer blow, and all they could hear was a loud sizzling sound coming from behind the kitchen door, which overlooked the yard.
Getting up gingerly, she picked Jimmy up from the floor. He was unconscious, having hit his head on the floor when the explosion had hit. She began to cry and held him against her as her husband groaned on the other side of the kitchen. He stirred and opened his eyes, saying "What happened, Mommy?", and she held him tighter and began saying a little prayer in her heart, Thank you Jehovah, Oh God, THANK YOU, for saving my son!
With relief nearly making her pass out, she got up and brushed the glass of Jimmy and then herself. It seemed like all the dishes on the table had exploded, and their back windows were gone too, gaping holes with dangerous teeth being all that was left of them.
By the time she had Jimmy cleaned up, with a bruise forming on his forehead, her husband was gingerly opening the back door. When they looked out, she could see straight away that Armageddon had indeed not arrived - something had fallen into their back yard and caused the explosion. Maybe it was one of those fighter jets after all, that had crashed there? It was certainly plausible, at the insane speeds those machines of death and destruction careened around at in the sky all the time lately.
But there was no fighter jet, not even the remains of one. Instead, there was a single, huge crater, filled with a silvery tear-drop shape made of metal.
Not knowing what it was at that point, her husband stupidly ventured out towards it, and it wasn't until he got halfway to the strange object that he began to scream again and jump around like he was trying to improvise some Fred Astair footwork. His shoes were melting. The ingot of metal had hit the ground so hot that it had turned it almost into lava for a meter or two around itself, due to the angle of penetration. Jenna knew that their house sat on thin soil, barely more than a meter in places, which covered a hard shale bedrock, and that this had probably prevented the metal teardrop from punching dozens of meters into the soft river soil bordering their property.
Jenna had been a scientist once, before she met Hector, who had turned her nascent Christianity into something different, something superiour. Hector had given her a Bible Study, and the things she had learnt had awakened her to a new understanding of her childhood religion. Six months after meeting Hector, she was baptized as a Witness of Jehovah, quit her job, and married Hector a few months after. Now she was a regular Pioneer, given to walking around in nearby neighbourhoods for entire afternoons and mornings, attempting to spread the Word of Jehovah in the form of magazines and books printed by a large company in New York called the Watchtower.
Of course, her earlier career in the aerospace industry still exerted it's influence on her - even now she was calculating how fast this object had to have been moving when it hit the soil, and she realized that the only way it could have been moving so fast was if it had come from space.
But that was impossible! Nobody had ever made metal ingots that could survive reentry and impact at speeds great enough to melt rock without being utterly destroyed themselves! She had only left the aerospace industry just under a decade ago, and although she hadn't been very involved in it or spoken with many of her friends since becoming a Witness (having non-Witness friends was frowned upon - they were Bad Association), she was fairly sure that no company of government had this sort of technology.
Maybe it was a sign from Jehovah!
After about ten minutes, the ground had cooled down enough to walk on, and the mesmerised mother and father watched in terror as a seam developed on the side of the ingot. It appeared out of nowhere, and a perfect circle of metal soon lifted itself away from the side of the ingot, got stuck for a moment on the soil near it, then popped out.
Inside was a man.
He struggled out, and after some seconds of grunting and groaning, lay on the ruined, incredibly hot soil outside the ingot. Dressed in an airforce jumpsuit, he looked like an ordinary fighter pilot, with the exception being that there was a thin ream of silver that appeared to have been surgically attached to his right temple somehow, encircling his upper ear.
Looking up, the man said "ArghGodplease help meI think I broke my arm" Jenna couldn't place his accent, but that didn't stop her from running up to the poor man and helping him to his feet. Hector took the man's left side, and they helped him through the ruined kitchen and into the bathroom, where Jenna gently unclipped the flight suit from the stunningly toned upper body of this mysterious pilot.
Now that she was able to look at him up close, Jenna realized that this was quite possibly the most beautiful man she had ever seen. Every line of his face seemed to have been sculpted to make him appear like an Adonis, and his muscles were toned to perfection, not too huge, just right for his frame, which approached 2 meters in length. Her heart fluttered when his oddly coloured lilac eyes settled on hers.
"Take it easy with that arm, ma'amlooks like even the suit couldn't save me from breaking that" he muttered as she unzipped his flight suit. With a curious feeling in her fingers, the arm of the suit came entirely off, and as she dropped it to the floor, she saw it floated down as if it was made of silk, not heavy fabric. Hector's eyes widened when he saw this too.
"Just hold still. I took some first aid courses when I worked for Boeing, and I might need to splint your arm. Hector, could you call an ambulance? It looks like this man's arm is pretty badly broken. What's your name?" she asked him as she washed her hands with soap in preparation for the splinting process. A broken arm did not merit a helicopter from the hospital, that she knew, and she knew that Hector would explain this. Besides, there was no real place for a helicopter to land here, near their house, surrounded as it was with trees. They would have to wait for the ambulance to drive to them from the nearby O'Hare hospital, nearly 30 kilometers down the Interstate.
"My name is Ahmed Suhijeen," the pilot replied, after grimacing in pain as she began slowly pulling the wrist bones into place, checking for a radial break.
"Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Suhijeen, only I wish it could have been under better circumstances. My name is Jenna Jaracz. Tell me, what happened to your plane? It looks like a big ball of metal now, not a plane! That impact looked pretty bad - what kind of armour did you put into your plane to allow you to survive a crash like that?"
"Oh, don't worry about that. We have special fibres woven into our flight suits for protection."
"No, but seriously, I saw the crater, any human being would have been turned into strawberry jam by an impact of that magnitude. You are very lucky to be alive. Or perhaps there is more than luck involved?"
"Why do you say that, Mrs. Jaracz?"
"A deal with the devil, perhaps?" she said, smiling for the first time since the impact.
"No such thing was involved! I and I had an engine malfunction, and I fell for a pretty long time before I hit the ground. My flight suit protected me."
"Mr. Suhijeen - can I call you Ahmed? Ahmed, I worked at Boeing for six years, as a ballistics engineer, and to be honest, there is no way that you could have survived that crash. You see, I specialized in the physics of plane crashes, and I know many detailed things about what the human body can and cannot survive in an impact situation. There is simply no way you can still be alive after that crash."
"Why, oh why, dear God, did I have to crash in the garden of a ballistics engineer? Oh good God."
"You're from the Navy, aren't you?"
"Kind of."
"What do you mean, kind of?"
"It's classified information, Mrs. Jaracz, if you don't mind. Thank you very much for your help, I don't mean to be rude, but it is top-secret information."
Hector chose that moment to walk back into the bathroom, and Jenna had him hold Ahmed's upper arm. While he pulled, she straightened out the fracture. Ahmed groaned and gritted his teeth, nearly screaming once when Jenna slipped, and then the arm was splinted. As she was busy tying some more bandages around the thin tomato-case plank she had used to splint the break, she said:
"Ahmed, one of my dear friends is from Pakistan. Her surname is also Suhijeen. Are you from that same region of the world?"
"I am, in fact. Punjabi, to be precise."
"Well, Ahmed, I hope the Air Force or whoever that machine of yours belongs to is going to pay to repair my lawn!" she said, unable to stop smiling at the gorgeous face of this top-secret flyer.
"Oh, that lawn will be the least of your worries soon!" he replied, grinning.
"What do you mean?" Hector asked, puzzled and more than a little bit jealous.
"Don't think my commanders don't know where I am. The rescue team will be here long before the ambulance arrives. It is OK to tell you this, because you are now under United Nations Protectorate status. You see, I am not just some pilot. I am in fact an officer in the United Nations Protectorate Forces, which you of course know nothing about. It is an inter-orbital, indeed, inter-planetary force, mobilizing tens of thousands of extremely high-tech vehicles such as mine to keep the peace here on Earth. It is a credit to our Department of Security that nobody on Earth apart from a few conspiracy-theorists even knows we exist, considering the extent of our military presence here. You will not be arrested per se, but neither will you be allowed back on Earth for a very long time.
I suppose it's OK to tell you these things, because it's exactly what you'll hear from my subordinates in a few minutes anyway. You now have two options, my friends. One, you can vote for an elective memory-wipe, and you will not remember the events of the previous day or two. Your lawn will be repaired while the memory wipe is in progress. You will be able to resume your normal lives. Two, you will be taken with us to the Protectorate base in High Earth Orbit, and you will not have to undergo the memory wipe procedure.
You see, nobody here on this world, apart from the conspiracy theorists that everyone else thinks are bonkers, knows about our presence here. My survey craft crashing was unfortunate, but it happened, and there is nothing to do now but cover the situation up and hope nobody important notices. You do understand the situation, do you not?"
Looking from the face of Hector to that of Jenna, who were both staring at him in stunned disbelief, he said:
"I know it seems hard for you to fathom. I haven't even told you much about the Protectorate. You, Jenna, you know that no human technology that is available today would have protected me from that impact. Look out of your bathroom window, notice the radial silicon that was created. I hit the ground moving at nearly six times the speed of sound at sealevel, Jenna! Even if I had been wearing padding a hundred meters thick, my brains would still have been turned into gray slush inside my pulverised skull! I appeal to your sense of logic! Please don't run away. We mean you no harm whatsoever."
Hector's brow furrowed, and, filled as it was with sudden sweat, a droplet of it was suddenly liberated and fell to the floor.
"That is BULLSHIT. You are no Protector, you're just a pilot with funny dreams. Maybe the crash screwed with your mind, I don't know. I'm calling the cops. Jenna, let's lock this bathroom. Seems Ahmed hasn't quite recovered from the crash yet."
For a moment, it seemed like Jenna would follow him. She desperately wanted to, to cleanse her mind of the incindiary words this man had spoken, but after a minute's deliberation, she remembered the thin layer of silicon that had coated the ground, something she had only seen once in a very high speed crash simulation of a new passenger plane that had been developed, a plane that could go nearly five times the speed of sound, a crash simulation which had shown zero survivors in all possible scenarios. No human technology, indeed.
"Hector, he's right. Nothing any company or government ever made could survive the crash. I don't know where they got that machine from, but we're in very hot water here. These people are dangerous, don't you understand? If they have a machine like that, who knows what else they've got?"
"You should listen to your wife, Hector. She talks a hell of a lot of sense," Ahmed said, looking from one face to another.
It was at that moment that the stealth extraction team's flyer descended silently outside. Thirty meters above their house, a group of six men clad from head to toe in silver with small backpacks underneath leapt onto the ceiling like cats, their bones not shattering from the huge fall. Nor did the tiles shatter. It almost seemed as if they had fallen slower than they should, without ropes to slow them down. Thirty seconds later, they stood at the door of the bathroom, peering at Jenna and Hector. Ahmed grinned and said:
"Good evening, gentlemen. So nice of you to make an appearance at our private party here!"
Looking from Jenna to Hector, the figure in the front said:
"We have isolated the impact zone. Nearest home is approximately three point 6 kilometers away, and a team has been dispatched. Early reports indicate that the couple called the police, and a brace of sergeants in mock Navy uniforms were sent to inform them not to worry, that a weather balloon had landed on this property. The situation is under control. Oh, and there's a kid downstairs."
Jenna gasped. She had hoped that little Jimmy would escape unnoticed.
"I trust you have already informed these citizens of our modus operandi, Commander?" the silver man said again. It was amazing, even his lips were made of silver, as if it had been poured over his flight-suited body.
"Indeed I have. So what is your decision, Mr. And Mrs. Jaracz?" Ahmed asked, after gazing at their stricken faces for a few seconds. Above and beyond the impact site, the silver men had convinced Jenna that Ahmed was telling the truth.
"You can put us in jail if you want. This country has laws and a Constitution, you know. Take your best shot, and we'll see you bastards in court. Now FUCK OFF!" Hector said, his face swelling in rage.
"Sergeant, sedate this man. He has become a liability," Ahmed said, his voice suddenly turning into the cool, clinical voice of a surgeon about to enter the operating room. Hector spun around, fists in the air, and was greeted by the muzzle of what appeared to be a gun made of glass. He crumpled to the floor as the silver man squeezed the trigger once, silently.
Tears welled up in her eyes as she was led out of the bathroom, where one of the men was waving a little black box over Hector. Ahmed placed his hand on her back and gently guided her out of the bathroom.
"Don't be concerned. We have no desire to hurt you. It would, in fact, earn us a court-martial if we did. Your husband was already marginal, but the appearance of my officers appears to have sent him over the edge. I find that you are a much more reasonable person."
"My son! Where is he?" she gasped, panic stricken at the thought of silver men doing to her son what they had done to her husband.
"He should be with you in a moment," Ahmed replied instantly, and she screamed in joy when her son arrived at the top of the stairs, escorted by three silver men.
Part 2 will follow shortly!
PS. For all those who've been experiencing issues with apostrophes disappearing during cut 'n paste operations into the edit box, there is a SOLUTION! It's simple really. It seems that the text box, which is basically a Rich Edit Control, doesn't like having apostrophes pasted into it for some reason. Thus, what I did was, I pasted the entire post into a text-only editor, NOT a Rich-Text editor, and THEN I cut the text from the text-only editor (a Notepad clone, for those who want to know!), and then pasted that text into the edit box, and it copied perfectly. Of course, this work-around is not without it's flaws, as you will lose all formatting in the post, but this is still better than losing critical apostrophes!