THE EX-FILES BOOK SIX OF DIMENSION OUT OF RANGE 30 JULY 1997 12.52pm Jay looked at the firehall, arms crossed in front of him, and smiled. It was a majestic restoration, if he did say so himself. They'd taken the "IRE DEPT." lettering off it, and stripped all the old paint off the wooden trim on the building. They refinished the concrete around the roll-up door, which had been replaced in spots with cinderblocks at one time after an inexperienced firefighter put a truck through the wall. The man-door set into the building beside the roll-up door was replaced with a new wooden door with a deadbolt in it, and the beat-up wooden roll-up door was replaced with a full glass-and-aluminum door with an electric opener. In one corner of the building was an attached-yet-subdivided set of rooms with its own entrance. It had started out life as the public library. In time, it was re-used as retail space. Now it, too, was part of the restoration of the hall. He and Brianna hadn't restored and repainted the firehall just for something to do; in actual fact, they'd purchased it and the land it was on. They also worked around purchasing the rights to build underneath a good part of the central portion of Brougham. Everything under the firehall and the replacement house they'd built on the site of Jason's old one, and everything in between, had become their complex, a good hundred and fifty thousand square feet or so. Jason unlocked the door of the hall and walked inside, locking it behind him. Instead of space to park two fire trucks, there was a ramp that descended belowground. He walked along the floor of the hall, around the edge of the ramp, and into the back room of the L-shaped area that had formerly been the firehall proper. In what used to be the long, narrow kitchen set in the middle of the building, along the inside edge of the long part of the L, there was another doorway, which led into the reclaimed library/retail space. In that space was a living room and some miscellaneous stuff. Jason, satisfied that the stuff that had become his new dream was still there, went back around to the ramp and walked down it. It was at least as spacious as the complex in Atlanta--even moreso, if you consider that there were only the two of them using this one, compared to the bunch that had formerly been in Gina's. Jason didn't ask where a lot of the things had come from; he just assumed that Bri' had concocted them out of whatever scraps she could find. All the equipment did have that Diggers-girl style of design about it, he realized. Except for PCzilla, the monster computer that was running in one corner of Jason's new lab. It had started out as a 'simple' Micron Pro2 400. Every time someone had gone past it while it was in the Atlanta lab, they'd 'tweaked' it a bit. Now, it was at least four times the size and speed of the original PC, and ran a six-line BBS-slash-Internet service. It was at the primary console of PCzilla that Brianna Diggers presently sat. "Hi," she said when she saw him coming. "Everything still out there?" "Ha," he said. "I just wanted to admire our handiwork one more time." "I know. You should take a picture of it so you don't have to do all that walking." "Gives me exercise until we develop a jogging/biking route." He sat down beside her. "Whatcha doin'?" "Oh, just mucking around," she said. "Checking out the local net topography up here." "Well, we got a bunch of stuff to plan out yet," he said. "Okay." She shut off the screen. "Like what?" "Where do you think we should put the Frakes recall unit?" "Hm.." she looked at the map they'd taped to the wall; one was in every room. "Not aboveground, right?" "What if the building gets wrecked somehow? At least underground there's a little bit of stability." "Ok, ok. How about the garage?" She was indicating the large room at the bottom of the ramp. "Okay," he nodded. He scribbled "FRAKES - GARAGE" on a notepad. "What do you think about putting a bunch of old fire memorabilia in the firehall? As a tribute to what it used to be." "What kind of memorabilia?" "Well, back in Calgary, there's a lot of photos and certificates we could hang on the wall, and a whole bunch of antique equipment and such." "You're not going to displace the pool table and the TV, are you?" "Hell no. Must have pool and TV." "Good." A buzzer sounded. All the doors--two on the house, two on the firehall--had two-way intercoms as doorbells. "Which one is that?" Jason said. Brianna looked at the phone, then pushed it toward him. "House front." "Hello?" Jason said as he put the handset to his ear. "Mister Low, could you come upstairs and speak to us?" He didn't know who this was, and after a moment, he realized that the man knew that there was a substantial underground area--why else would he have said "come upstairs"? "Um.. sure. I'll be right up." "No rush." Jason hung up the phone. "Oh, fuck, oh fuck." "What?" Brianna said with concern. "I think bylaw enforcement or someone like that is up top. They knew about the complex. They asked me to 'come upstairs' and meet them." "Calm down, don't panic." She put a hand on his shoulder. "Did they say anything threatening?" "No, but.." "Don't sweat it. Let's go see what they want." She led him through the complex, toward the stairs to the house. They climbed up into the four-room bungalow, walked through the open living room, and opened the front door. Two men in dark suits came inside. "Good day, sir, ma'am," the one who'd spoken to Jason already said. "I'm Major Mike Myers, and this is Major Al Gordon. We're with a.. special division of the armed forces." Jason and Brianna shook their hands, and Jason was wondering what the hell was going on. Myers continued to speak. "We've got a lot to talk about, but first, may we have a look around?" "Why?" Jason instantly snapped defensively. Myers smiled. "We're impressed by what you accomplished here in just a few short weeks. In return for letting us look around--we're taking no pictures or recordings, and we won't be stealing any of your technology, I assure you--we have some rather shocking information that you may be interested in. And you particularly, Jason." Jay never liked anyone he didn't know calling him by his first name, but he avoided the confrontation for now. He looked at Brianna, who was giving him a look which said 'what the hell, why not'. "Okay, Mike," he said, pointedly, and led them into the house. "This house is here primarily for the facilities. It's got a living room, here, and a kitchen, bathroom, and spare bedroom along the north wall." It felt absurd to be showing off a house to a pair of military men who didn't disclose much of their reason for being here, but what the hell. "The stairs go down to the.. complex, and so does the elevator platform just adjacent to the back door there." "Impressive," Gordon said, smiling. "May we go see it? The complex, I mean." "Um. Yeah." Jason went down the stairs, the two men following, and Brianna taking up the rear. "How do you know so much about us, please?" Brianna said. "We know all about your origins," Myers directed to Jason. "We're from a joint task force that the governments involved don't really like to acknowledge exists--much like the things we find." "When you say my 'origins'," Jay said, turning as he reached the bottom of the stairs, "you mean.." "All your jumping, and all that," Gordon finished. "You're quite a celebrity within our organization." Jason shook his head to clear the thoughts from it. "Right. Anyway, we're now in the living spaces. There are four bedrooms in this area--three spares, and ours. Beyond that is a pair of bathrooms at the end of the hall." Jason turned left. "Along this end leads to our laboratories and such." "We know about you, too, Miss Diggers," Myers spoke up as they walked along the corridor to the labs. "You're quite popular in our circles too. And your sisters and colleagues." She didn't know how to answer, so she just nodded and said "Thank you." "So these are our labs," Jason said. "We've got just about everything here." "So we gathered," Myers said distantly, regarding some of the equipment. Jason carried on with the tour, seeming to, despite the strange nature of the visit, get a kick out of it. He walked them through the entire underground complex, showing off the labs, the armory, the ready-room, Brianna's running track that circled the underground portion, the gym, a few spare rooms, and the garage. "This must be the truck that we've heard so much about from our field agents," Myers said, smiling and laying a hand on the hood. "Impressive." "Thank you," Jason said after a moment, after trying unsuccessfully to grasp the concept of field agents tracking him. "There's more upstairs at this end." Jason led them up the ramp and showed them the rebuilt firehall, and the look on the military men's faces when they realized where they were was one of surprise. "Not bad, Mike, not bad at all," Gordon remarked to his colleague. "Now, you've seen my place," Jason told them as they returned down the ramp to the complex. He leaned against the truck, with Brianna behind him. He folded his arms and said, "Mind telling me what's the military's interest in us?" "You have some connections to some sites we've uncovered around the globe," Myers said. "Is Brian Burgess here?" Gordon added. "Brian's living in Atlanta," Jason responded. "What sites? Some places we've explored?" "Probably not, at least not in the way you think. But we think you've been there before." Myers cleared his throat and went into bureaucratic mode. "Our agency is a black program. What we are about to show you is beyond top secret. Persons who gain access to this information who are not permitted to are shot. Do you understand what I'm saying?" "Do I REALLY want to know, now?" Jason said. "Get serious." Myers spoke again. "Morningdale, Massachusetts; Crato, Brazil; Carnarvon, Australia; and Kananaskis, Alberta. Do these hold any special significance to you?" Jason noticed that the military man had a hand in his briefcase. "Mmmmaybe," Jay drew out. "I spent a few years of my life near K-Country. Why?" "Tell me if you recognize anything in these photographs." Myers pulled out three ten-by-twelve black-and-white prints and handed them over. To Gordon, who was eyeing Brianna, he said, "Relax. She's as much a part of this as he is." Jason looked up at Myers briefly, then Gordon, then looked down to the photos and almost dropped them. The first one, the one from so-called "Kananaskis", was actually from a dig near the Elbow River, near the town of Bragg Creek, where he'd once resided and recently visited. That was pure coincidence, though. He also knew that it was the site where the SDF-1 had crashed after Earth was destroyed in the Robotech universe. The part that gave him pause was what was being carefully dug out of the ground, as if the area was an archaeological site, which, of course, it was. The photo showed several dozen people meticulously extracting the two legs of a Gerwalk-moded Veritech, still attached to the hip joint, lying upside-down. The paint was entirely gone, and the fighter had begun to rust. Other objects could be seen in the photo, having soil dusted away from them: Some Veritech fingers, several bits of twisted and rent metal, and so on. Jason almost feared to look at the next photo, but he did anyway. It looked like it was the one from Brazil. It was another dig site, and it was much larger than the last. It appeared to be the ruins of an apartment-style building, buried deep under the forest floor. Only the first two floors of the building remained, but Jay was pretty sure there'd been a third floor on it. He could see more rusty equipment lying there, and several glinting objects on the "roof" of the building, or likely on the floor of the 3rd floor, which had lost its walls and roof. The third and final photo was from Australia, judging by the terrain, and by the structure Jason knew well. It was a large house, but it had seen many better days. It looked to be structurally unsound now, and the paint was cracking and peeling. Many windows were broken, and those that were not were coated in a thick film of dust. A long scrap of metal in the foreground, out of focus, could be seen; it was medium grey with dark grey, foot-high lettering on it. The lettering was barely recognizable as "RBUS A340". "Holy.. SHIT," Jason said quietly. He felt cold all over and somewhat ill. "If you think that's exciting, read the backs of the photos," Myers intoned. Jason, trembling, turned the pictures over. On the back of the Bragg Creek picture, was the exact time and date of the print, the exact location, and the dig data. Items found: two legs of robotic design, with aircraft-type wheels stored inside on hinged joints, and jet engines inside them; three fingers of the same alloy, possibly from the same robotic device; 260 linear meters of various kinds of cable; 13 kilograms of shattered glass of military aircraft canopy grade; and 3.3 metric tons of unidentifiable scrap metal. Estimated time buried: 62,000 years earlier. "What the FUCK?" "Read the next one; it gets better." Gordon wasn't as humored as Myers was. Jason flipped to the Brazilian photo. Two stories plus basement of an apparent three-story apartment building, mostly well-preserved. Bottom of basement is 83 meters underground. Many identification cards, clothes, personal effects, etc. of a type expected to exist in the mid-2010s. Third story, minus walls and ceiling, severely damaged. Two of four rooms held identifiable objects. A television set with the Sony brand name, using technology not produced yet. A photograph of a man and a woman, faded but still visible, coated in some type of plastic compound as-yet-unidentified by lab tests. One plastic passkey with engraved, colored (again, faded) symbols on it. A red-and-white delta-in-a- circle, the letters R D F, the name "LOW, CAPTAIN JASON ALEXANDER", and the number "100 948 322". A similar passkey with "BURGESS, CAPTAIN BRIAN WAYNE" and the number "101 063 573". "Oh, fuck," Jason said, truly starting to shake. "Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.." It didn't help to read that the site had been underground, awaiting discovery, for almost 215,000 years. The final photo's comments explained that it was not a dig; the house there had been standing in the open desert outside the town for some 35 years, unexplored until now. The interior of the house was primarily empty, but there were some objects found. Two aluminum containers marked "Frakes Scanner"; eleven boxes of paper, specifically designed for a Hewlett-Packard color laser printer; 3 rolls of Kodak Ektachrome 400/36 film, manufacture date September 2002; 16 small aluminum cases labelled "Dimensional Stabilizer"; and the aforementioned scrap of airframe-grade metal supposedly from an Airbus A340 belonging to Air Canada Cargo, based out of Toronto. There was a special note on this last item noting that the plane in question was intact and operating as a cargo craft at Pearson International Airport to this very day. "Jesus," Jason whispered. Then he realized something. "There's only three sites shown here. You also mentioned Morningdale, Mass." Myers nodded. "That 'site' was only one object. A utility crew trenching a new fiber-optics line found an object that broke their digger." Jason gaped. "BROKE it?" "It was made of some indestructible plastic-metal composite. We immediately stored it away after we found your fingerprints upon it. We also found your prints on objects at the other three sites. You haven't been going around to these places recently, have you?" "No," he shook his head. He looked at Brianna, and she was as stunned as he was. "Actually, I've been in Scotland for the past few weeks, and before that, just out and about, nowhere specific. Mostly hanging around Atlanta with one quick side-trip to Iran and another to Texas." Myers appeared to be quite at ease with the concept of a 'quick side-trip' to a country halfway around the world. Perhaps he was, if he was a government spook. "Well, in any case, these things basically belong to you, and we'd like to have you look at them, shed a bit of light on things for us, and then you can bring them home, to do with them as you please." "Um.." Jason began, quite unsure of himself. "Oh, come on, Jay," Bri' said, apparently regaining her thrill of adventure. She slapped him on the back. "It'll be fun, like looking at old yearbooks, or something along those lines." he said to himself as he heard his voice agreeing with her and with Myers. Brian and Gina were contacted that afternoon, and Brian was equally shocked at the find. He was more interested in why the government was being so cooperative with them in promising to give them all the stuff without picking it apart. He decided that either they already had, or they weren't telling Jason the truth. In other words, Brian was very leery of the government's behavior. Gina, on the other hand, saw it as an exciting adventure to go on, much as Brianna did. She was very eager to get going, so they agreed to head out to the sites the next day. On the way to Bragg Creek, flying in the truck and following the government's transport plane, Jay reflected on the sites indicated. They were to completely excavate the Bragg Creek site first, then go on to Brazil, then Australia, and then Massachusetts, or rather to where the object from there was being kept. He lingered on the item reported found in Massachusetts. Myers and Gordon had refused to elaborate; all they would say is that they'd told Jason all they knew on that topic, and that it was being kept in a vault at the National Security Agency. Jason realized, quite chillingly. Several hours later, the Gina-Mobile and the Tonka Truck were in Bragg Creek, accompanied by two Suburbans and two Hummers, which had to drive from Calgary, which was where the closest airport large enough to handle the Starlifter. The truck and car waited in the parking lot of the shopping center for the military personnel. It was quite obvious that whatever this 'special section of the armed forces' was, it included personnel from both Canada and the USA. Nobody in the group of four friends anticipated what happened next. Out of the passenger seat of one of the Hummers stepped a large man in a suit. Jason's eyes widened and he wanted to run, but his mind reasoned with his body, explaining that they were in a large, heavily populated mall parking lot. Lurch approached as the Canadian military men did. He had a contemptuous smirk on his face. "And so we meet again," he sneered. "Special Agent Stephen Thomas." Jason uneasily shook the large man's hand. "I.. don't suppose you'd care to identify the three-letter-organization you belong to." "No, I don't suppose I would," he returned smugly. "Gentlemen, we've got a lot of work to do today," Al Gordon spoke up. "I'm here for the same reason these men are--to observe," Lurch, or rather Thomas, told Jay and his friends. "You have no reason to be concerned. So far." That didn't relieve them one bit. The dig site was on the river bank, about a kilometer upstream from town. The river had been temporarily diverted out away from the bank, and unnamed men were extracting more objects from the muddy soil. The foursome was allowed down into the site to inspect it. They had found three more Veritech fingers, one pin from the ejection seat, part of the screen and control pad for the flight computer, another kilogram of glass, and another 90 kilograms of miscellaneous scrap metal, armored-airframe- grade. "Jay," Brian said in a rush, "Come lookit this." He walked over and saw a red cylindrical object, about five centimeters across by three deep, sticking out of the soil. He turned to Brian. "After sixty-two thousand years? What'll it be like?" Jason said. "Highly unstable?" "Um, yeah." The two turned as one and left the area. They approached the military and told them of the unexploded missile. The site was briefly evacuated, and then the missile was carefully dug out, still intact. The red-tipped, two-meter-long device was loaded onto one of the flatbeds, which proceeded at best speed to the nearby military base for a quick detonation of the warhead. The dig carried on; no more missiles were found. In fact, after that, it appeared that everything that was going to be pulled from the ground had been. The dig team was sent off, and Jason, Brian, Brianna, and Gina stood in the pit, inspecting the things found. Jason ran a hand along the rusty edge of the scrap metal. He blinked. "Check this out." The others gathered around. He picked up the one piece of metal, searched the pile, then picked up another. He held them up; the pieces fit together like a puzzle. "What the..?" Brianna said. "I'll bet we've got most of the fuselage of the fighter right here," Jason said. "All cut at crazy angles." "By who?" Jason turned to Gina. "By WHAT." "'By what'?" she echoed. Brian saw Jason's point. He gestured to the metal. "No rough edges from a torch, no tearing or twisting. It's as if these parts simply ended right there. It's been long speculated, but never proved, that a craft subjected to multiple dimensional rifts at once would come apart in such a way. Imagine if you were through a dimensional portal of some kind, half in one dimension, half in another, when the portal closed." "Ugh." "Uh-huh." Once they were satisfied that the site was dug entirely out, the military loaded all the debris onto the flatbeds and hauled it to the transport plane at the airport, where it would be stored for now. It was after supper, and Jason told the military that he and his friends would visit his family for the night, and start fresh in the morning. And so they did, flying to Brazil. It was more of the same; in addition to the things seen and mentioned in the photograph, they found half-a-dozen rooms in the barracks' first and second floors entirely intact. How the contents had managed to stay looking almost new for 215,000 years, while a supposedly near- indestructible Veritech had rusted after only 65,000, was a mystery. Maybe it was the river, or the dimensional vortex the plane appeared to have been caught in. Jay found Bri' looking over his shoulder as he studied an item--the preserved photograph mentioned in the itemized list Myers had originally shown them. "Who's that?" she said. "I'm sure you recognize the guy," Jay said quietly, almost sadly, as he looked at the photo. "The woman was my wife, Aileen. She had been a civilian support staffer for the RDF at Brazilia Base, but I convinced her to transfer over to the pilot side. And to marry me." He chuckled briefly, then resumed going around the floor of his old room, picking up chunks of debris. Brian climbed onto the decimated third floor from a ladder propped up beside the building, and walked over to Jay and Bri'. "Jason. Check this out. I found it on the second floor landing." Brianna again couldn't place anyone except Brian and Jason, looking slightly different, same as Jason had in the photo of him and Aileen. "Think back to the TV show 'Robotech'," Jason said. "This guy beside me is Max Sterling, unarguably the best fighter pilot that ever lived. Between him and Brian is Miriya, Max's Zentraedi wife, unarguably the second best pilot as far as Earth goes--went, and the best as far as Zentraedi pilots go. Went." They continued to search the building, taking the full day and part of the next morning. After everything that could be salvaged had been, the military cleared everyone back a few hundred meters and then blew the building up. Afterwards, the rubble was carted away, the hole filled in, and trees planted so the forest would reclaim (or claim, in the first place) that small patch of land. They could see the house from six miles out. The plane and the truck and car landed right out in front, on the airstrip that Jason and friends--Brian, Amy, and Jenna--had created, a lifetime before. How it'd stood here in the middle of nowhere in Australia without being spotted was a mystery. <35 years, huh?> Jason wondered, turning over a rock with his foot. He had his hands stuffed in his pockets. He tried to decide if the contents of the house would still be intact, or would they be crumbled to dust? Then again, two days earlier, he'd gone to an apartment building that'd been perfectly preserved for 215,000 years.. At once, he strode up to the front door of the house and opened it. It was like they'd never left. Brian came up beside Jay on one side while Bri' did the same on the other. Brian spoke. "I wonder how.." "Dimensional rifts," Jason said. "It has to be the answer. It couldn't've survived the attack." "Come again?" Gina said, standing beside Brian. Jay opened a kitchen cupboard. Very dusty drinking glasses sat there in rows. "When we owned this house, we would go away for hundreds of years at a time, by means of a dimensional jump drive. We'd often return right after we left, but anyway, one time, when we came back, someone had somehow attacked the Earth in our six-month absence, and all the air had bled off. This house had been uprooted, too--everything above the foundation was gone. I guess it'd been moved to another dimension--this one--and kept safe for us until we came to get it." He remembered something, and spun to face Brian. "I wonder if the Anchors are still in the ground out there." "I'M wondering if the vaults are still in the basement down THERE," he pointed to the door to the stairs. "The vaults! I forgot," Jason said. He followed Brian over to the door, and the girls followed behind. If Brian was right, they would descend into the basement; if he was wrong, and the foundation under the house was gone, they would be staring at a patch of dirt. There were stairs leading down. Brian and Jason sprinted down the stairs, almost breaking their necks when they realized there was no power and therefore no lights. Gina and Brianna had thought to bring flashlights, though, so they saved their friends from crashing into things. It looked like the average basement in an average house. At least to the girls, it did; Brian and Jason took one of the flashlights and ran to a far wall. "Here," Jason said, pushing on one section. It caved in, revealing a perfectly square doorway. He looked at the other three, grinned, and stepped through. His cheers could be heard as the rest joined him in the vaults. He and Brian and Amy and Jen had constructed this 'secret' room off one end of the basenent of the house, so that they could store things without people knowing. Now that they were inside, they realized that this house came from a slightly different reality than the one they thought. In the original vaults, the D-Team had put about fifty thousand Australian dollars, paperwork and photos on about a hundred missions they'd been on, and Jay, Bri, and Amy's old RDF uniforms (from the dimension they'd been in after Bri and Jay had been torn from the WDF era). In this set of vaults, they found at least a million-five in money, no less than twenty pieces of computer gear, records for at least three hundred and twenty-five missions, the aforementioned uniforms, and dozens of other miscellaneous items. And another door. "Anyone else want to do this?" Jason said as he walked up to it. "I just realized you two girls are more or less just observers here." "Sure," Gina shrugged, and joined her sister in front of the concrete slab. They each put a hand on it and pushed. The door slid inward and then fell to the floor, as the first one had. Unlike the first one, it opened into a much larger room. Or rather, cavern. Jay and Bri pushed past the gaping girls and then stopped short themselves when they saw the contents. Three mint-condition-but-dusty Veritech Fighters in Gerwalk mode. "Holy shit," Brian understated. Again, the military took all the stuff the foursome wanted to keep and loaded it into the cargo plane. Jason smiled when he saw the military men watch the Veritechs get loaded onto the plane. Surely they wanted to dissect and mass- produce the incredible fighters, but they were going back to the two complexes in Atlanta and Brougham, to be stored as museum pieces. Once again, the local government asked for permission to bulldoze the house once the four friends had extracted their belongings from it. They got it, and ten hours after the military and the foursome left, there was never any evidence that there'd been a house there. Jason was sure that that was partly to reclaim the land, and partly to ensure that these abnormalities in reality were eradicated. The next stop was Washington, DC. The vehicles were kept at a government hangar on the airport grounds, and Jay, Bri, Bri', and Gina were driven in the Suburbans to an NSA complex nearby. When they arrived, to everyone's dismay, Brianna, Bri, and Gina were ordered to stay in a waiting room, and Thomas escorted Jason alone to an elevator. "I'm pretty sure I know what you've got here," Jason said to Lurch as they descended. "I just have a few questions first. A, how did you figure out that it's mine? Two, how long has it been here--on Earth? And thirdly, have you been trying to screw with it at all?" They'd emerged on a subbasement level, and Thomas smiled and swiped a cardkey through a reader, then opened the adjacent door. They descended down several flights of deserted stairs. "In order, it has your fingerprints on it; about as long as the South American site; and no, our men couldn't even pretend to know where to begin." Jason felt relieved. "I'm glad. It's quite dangerous." "I believe you," Thomas said. He used his cardkey on another door that opened into a long hallway. "You will never be here again, so I suppose I can tell you this. We are thirty-six floors belowground. There is no one anywhere around us; the nearest living thing is six floors above in a medical vault." Jason wondered what Thomas meant by 'living thing'; it didn't sound like he meant a human. What purpose would a medical vault have at NSA? "Here we are." Thomas cardkeyed one last door and pulled it open. A hiss of air escaped, and they walked into a small, nearly-featureless room. The door again hissed as it closed behind them, and the drawer set into the far wall hissed as Thomas pulled it open. Jason's eyes grew unbelievably wide as he realized that what he was looking at was exactly what he'd expected to find. He snatched it up without waiting for Thomas to give him permission. As Jay hefted the small yet heavy object, Thomas scowled and said, "I don't suppose you'd be willing to shed some light on what that is, now, would you?" "No," Jason said smugly, holding on quite firmly to the object in question, "I don't suppose I would." They returned to the waiting room, and Brian was the only one to get a glimpse of the artifact Jay had retrieved before the latter stuffed it into a provided plastic bag. Myers and Gordon were now in attendance again, and Myers cleared his throat. "We thank you for your cooperation, and now, we have a proposition for you." "I KNEW there had to be a catch!" Jay said in a half-seething, half-humorless- laugh tone. He regarded the three military men in a new, unpleasant way. "All this stuff given to us without so much as a single bolt taken for inspection, only for a tour of our complexes. I thought so." "We're not asking much," Gordon protested. "We just have some.. things we'd like you to do." "Like what?" Brian said as calmly as possible. "We used this opportunity as a test to learn your investigative and search techniques," Thomas said. "We wanted to know how you worked at things and how you came to your conclusions." "Okay, you do now; so what?" Gina asked. "..Forgive us, it's kind of embarrassing," Myers finally said. "We encounter a few.. 'unexplainable' phenomena each year. Most of these cases end up unsolved, sometimes because the agents working it are reassigned to higher-priority jobs, but most of the time because the evidence is.. 'insufficient'." Jay laughed briefly. "You want to throw us all the weird cases your regular people can't handle," he clarified. Thomas frowned. "To put it one way." "Are we sure to get reimbursed for any expenses we incur on these government- sponsored missions?" queried Gina. "Absolutely," Gordon said. "However, calling it government-sponsored isn't exactly true. If ever questioned about your activities or missions, or even your existence as a hired team, we will deny everything." "And this tape will self destruct in five seconds," Brian quipped. Bri' turned to Jay and punched him in the arm playfully. "See? We ARE Scully & Mulder." "Hey, yeah," he said, grinning. "Maybe we'll get the keys to Area 51, too." The military men did not laugh, or even smile, at any of the jokes. "Why do I get the feeling," Bri said a moment later, catching on, "that you've already got something lined up for us right away?" Thomas looked away for a moment, and Jason was happy to see the formerly-scary guy squirm. "Actually.. a pair of fighters crashed--or rather, vanished--over the Persian Gulf six days ago. We've exhausted all our resources in our search and have come up empty-handed. We'd like you to try your hand at finding them." "Oh, really?" Jason smirked, then got serious. "Sorry. Do tell." "At 2100 Zulu, six days ago, as I mentioned, two F-16s went off radar without any warning at all. They were on a routine patrol mission, and the pilots did not report anything out of the ordinary during the flight." "What do we do when we find them?" Jason asked. "Contact the US Navy by radio. Use 243 megahertz, AM band. Your callsign will be 'Bloodhound' and you will be calling 'Master'." "Gotcha." "Do you need anything else?" "Last known course, speed, altitude, and location," Brian piped up. The information was supplied, and they considered themselves ready. They told the military men they'd begin searching at oh-six-hundred the next day. THE NEXT MORNING "You know what I want to do?" "Is it the same thing you wanted to do six minutes ago?" Brian droned tiredly over the radio. "Nah. I wanna bring VRsenal to this world." Brian looked out his window, to Jay, who was in the driver's seat of the Tonka Truck, across the way. "Tired of NetFighter?" "You can only ace it so many times before the scenarios start repeating themselves." "So link up with someone and play head-to-head." "The only one who'll play with me is Bri', and we can see each other's screens from here." "Here's an idea," Brian said. "I've been saving this URL for when you started bitching. Try going to zork.net.salusia. Zork-style games are a big hit on Salusia, and they're running multiple games in that flavor off their net site. Randomly generated worlds, stronger monsters, etc etc etc. It's great big gobs of fun." Bri could see Jay's face light up from across the way as he logged in. "Wow! This is fantastic! Thanks, Bri. Don't bug me until we're there." Brian laughed. A short time later, they arrived on site, and found nothing, of course. A grid search was initiated. "I'm picking up a surface vessel at 65 degrees, 680 kilometers out," Brianna declared a few minutes later. Jay looked up. On the HUD, magnified a few hundred times, was what looked like a large American supercarrier. It wasn't radiating any signals common to US ships, though, flew no flag, and even from the great distance, Jason could make out some unusual structures on the deck. "Let's take a cautious look," he said quietly. He typed for a second. "Engaging whisper mode." Visually and physically, nothing had changed; however, anyone following by radar or other measures wouldn't be able to any more. Jay and Brian had put cloaking equipment, 'acquired' from the Zardon Weather Disruptor, in the automobiles. They flew over the ship undetected. The three unfamiliar structures turned out to be huge devices resembling ray guns. "Zoinks," Gina contributed. Jay put the truck into a left-handed bank, to return to the search area. "For once," he said as he brought up the throttles, "I concur wholeheartedly." They spent more than a couple of hours rocketing over the search area, staying in 'whisper' mode. They found a lot of ocean, several ancient sunken ships laden with treasure, a few new species of fish, and several dozen aircraft and watercraft going in all different directions--totally missing the cloaked vehicles. Brianna suddenly made a surprised sound. Jason looked up at her. "What?" he said. "I think I've got something. Dead ahead, at 450 kilometers, there's an island. I'm picking up two lifesigns on it." "Are they the pilots?" "Can't tell." "Why not?" "The cloak interferes with the scanners," she said simply. "I see." Jason radioed Gina to tell her of the island, then added more speed to his own flight. They sat quietly while the ships neared the island in question. The scanners, as the information got easier to read, showed no signs of any fighters, or any dense equipment of note. There were two live humans there, and according to the infrared scan, they were waving at the truck. Jason realized something as he got closer. To the downed pilots, or whoever was on the island, at the distance he was presently at, it would just look like some nondescript aircraft. The lot of them would have a fair bit of explaining to do when they landed and proved to be a Dodge Ram and a custom-built hot rod. "Yup. They're the pilots, all right," Brianna declared. The normal video feed was now showing a magnified image of two men in American flight/G-suits. "Okay, let's get down there, get 'em, then get out." Jason reached out, as if not really interested, and pushed the key that prepared the truck for a landing. The two vehicles touched down on a sandy part of the average-sized island, right next to a pair of inflatable one-person rafts, of the variety that were found in ejection seat survival kits. Jay and friends dismounted their rides and waited for the somewhat-surprised airmen to approach. "Gentlemen," Jay finally spoke up as the two began to cautiously come nearer. "We're your rescue." "We're a civilian special-operations team," Brianna bent the truth a little, to try to explain their presence. "We were hired by the government to execute the search for you, after you disappeared so cleanly from existence." Jason began introductions, and found that the one, blond-haired pilot was Greg "Bug" Farnsworth, and the black-haired guy was Phil "Curious" George. The two men seemed to eventually accept the fact that the rescue was done by a non- military force. Jason and Brian opted not to point out that they'd each seen a few thousand years of military service themselves. "Did you happen to see an unusual-looking aircraft carrier in the area while you were searching?" Bug asked. The four friends looked at each other. Then Jay spoke up. "Mmmmaybe," he drew out. "Why?" "We think it had something to do with our crash," Curious answered. "Maybe a big, focused interference pulse. Our planes' systems all died just after we did a flyby on the boat." Bug picked it up. "After we went in the drink, we saw the rescue helo coming for us, but as it got close, we could hear some kind of weird hum from the carrier, and suddenly, the helo wobbled a bunch, then turned around and looked like it was trying to limp back toward the ship. Our ship, I mean." "Did you see either of them at all after that?" Brian wanted to know. "Nope, nada," Bug returned. "The carrier went off north-northwestward, and the helo went out of sight over the horizon southwest. We never saw them again." "I think it's probably worth our while to go look for both of 'em," Jay said to his friends. "A, we were never told about the helo, but it might be out here somewhere, and 2, that carrier needs to be stopped." "I agree," Bri' said, backing her partner up. "So long as our passengers are up to it." The airmen were eyeing the truck. Jason said, "Don't worry, we can hold our own in a fight." Curious looked at Jason. "So, what you're saying is.." "If you have no objections, we'd like to, on our way back to getting you to civilization, open up a big'ol can'o Whup-Ass on that boat." The pilots' eyes lit up. "What do you want us to do?" Bug said excitedly. "You know, this would've worked out a lot better if you'd've thought to lock in the last-known-location of that ship," Brianna said to Jay as they searched. He hated hearing her I-told-you-so tone, especially with guests aboard. "Yeah, yeah, I'm so sorry. Just keep an eye open for it." Just then, the HUD briefly blinked out, then came back on. Jason suddenly felt rather uneasy about being 12,000 meters above the surface of the Earth. "What the hell was that?!?" he said. "Don't know," Brianna said, switching to a diagnostic screen. "It rebooted without warning, ..because of a power disruption." "Shit!" Jason hissed. "Was that an EM pulse?" "Very likely." "Hang on," Jason said. He put the truck in a bank, keyed up the radio, and turned on whisper mode, all at the same time. He was trying to contact Brian and Gina, but the radio sounded different. There was no noticeable carrier tone. It was dead. The cloaking system seemed to be inoperative, too. "I thought this thing was shielded!" he said as he finally got sight of the carrier, a few hundred kilometers away, now dead ahead as he levelled out. "It is!" Bri' shot back. The two in the back said very little, and what they did say was wholly ignored, as Bri' and Jay made attempts to launch any kind of attack at the oncoming ship. Nothing seemed to work, except flight controls. They watched all three EM guns come to bear on them. "Oh, -fuck-," they all said in unison. No visible beam erupted from the rayguns, but the truck shuddered as its entire computer system was destroyed with an electromagnetic pulse. Jason even felt like he had a bit of a headache coming on, but that might've just been the situation. Every control, every display--everything had now officially Gone Dead. Just about the only thing left that was working were the doors. "We've got to bail out!" he hollered to the others. "You two have your reserve chutes, right?" "Yeah!" Bug shouted back. "Good. Get out and use them! We'll be along in a second!" The two men uneasily opened the back doors and pushed themselves into the air. They instantly fell 'up', by Jay and Bri's perspective, as they were travelling much slower than the truck, which was behaving exactly as one would expect a ten-ton truck to do when plummeting from twelve kilometers up. Jason and Brianna dove for the box of the truck. Bri and Gina were in disbelief; they were away, on the other side of the ship, and therefore out of its line of fire. They hadn't been affected by either pulse, and they were now cloaked. That didn't stop them from defending the pilots, though, who were floating down, unarmed and unprotected, to the ocean once again. They saw a pair of figures exit the truck--Jay and Bri', in their armor--and their attention became riveted to the truck, as it continued to fall. Jason watched with despair as his greatest work of art in decades continued on its uncontrolled descent back to Earth. He felt like he was watching a close friend go down in flames. Then, he couldn't believe his eyes as the truck impacted the port bow of the carrier. He expected a grand, Industrial Light & Magic-caliber explosion, and then the end of his dream ride. Instead, he watched in shock as it punctured the port bow, with a minor spurt of sparks, flame, and smoke, and burst out the starboard stern end, trailing lots of smoke and flame, plummeting into the ocean with a great cloud of steam. Both the entry and exit wounds on the carrier were now belching great plumes of acrid black-grey smoke, and the ship was taking on water very fast. Before long, the elevator openings on the hangar were at the waterline, and almost immediately, it sank very fast. Within a few seconds, all that there was to indicate that anything had happened was a patch of churned water with some burning fuel atop it, one or two lifeboats, and a heap of floating red-and- black wreckage, about half a kilometer past the point where the carrier sank. The island turned out to be nearby again, so they put down on it. Jason watched dejectedly as Brian and Gina went out with the car and managed to get a line on the Tonka Truck and drag its floating debris to shore. Then, Brian got on the auxiliary radio. "Bloodhound, this is Master," the voice finally crackled through the static. "You're very weak, but we can hear you." "Master, this is Bloodhound. We're safe with your men, but one of our rides is wrecked. We need a pickup, over." "Roger," the person on the other end told Bri. "Give us your location and we'll get a bird from Riyadh to come get you and your rides, and return you to the other side of the pond." "Much appreciated," Brian returned. "Bloodhound out." After six hours, a Starlifter finally arrived, somehow able to land on the grassy central part of the island, and they managed to drag the carcass of the Tonka Truck onboard, half-full of seawater and debris. The long flight was made impossibly longer by the fact that they had to all sit in the cargo bay all the way home, looking at one of the greatest accomplishments of their careers reduced to a wreck. THE NEXT AFTERNOON Jason trudged out of the mall with Brianna in tow. The two of them were laden with groceries. Without a vehicle to put them in, they'd have to either get a taxi or take a bus. Getting a taxi was nigh-impossible, both because of their location and the fact that the ride would cost forty bucks, so they walked across the parking lot, past the old Esso station, and stood on the sidewalk by the street where the bus would arrive. Jason suddenly realized something and looked around. Bri' apparently clued in too. "If you don't mind me asking," she said, "In your WDF days, what were you doing back on Earth, in 4373?" "Touristy type stuff," Jason immediately answered. "Sightseeing. Watching for the comet. I'd already seen Hale-Bopp twice in two separate 1997s, and while on patrol saw more than one or two.. thousand.. comets, but when we realized that it was 4373, and I remembered that that was the year that Hale-Bopp was supposed to reappear above Earth, I thought what the hell, let's go." A Durham Region Police Department cruiser roared by, lights on but no siren, and turned into the mall across the street, the mall with the McDonald's, the Canadian Tire, and the Scotiabank. The latter would be--in at least one reality--bought out by the WorldBank Corporation in the late 38th century. Jason was naturally very interested when the cruiser screeched to a stop in front of the Scotiabank and the two officers, carrying shotguns, rushed inside. After a few moments, they came out with a pair of would-be bank robbers. Jason smiled. "That's the way you do it." Bri' didn't know what he was talking about, as she'd been looking elsewhere. Still, she picked it up right away: "You play the guitar on the MTV?" Jay laughed. "Exactly." A resounding thunderclap shook the area. The navy blue clouds began to open up, and Jason led Brianna to the nearest object suitable for protecting them from the thunderstorm. Five meters away, a small Lexan-and-concrete-and-steel structure, one meter deep by three meters wide by three meters tall. The Bus Stop. *THE* Bus Stop. In spite of his past, Jason felt quite happy. He roared with laughter, and after a moment, Brianna joined in. EPILOGUE VERY LATE THAT NIGHT Jay studied the items strewn about his brand-spanking-new complex. A Veritech part here, a Frakes scanner there, and all of it in a huge pile, almost indistinguishable as individual objects. Except the polished black square, a little bigger than an old Rubik's Cube, that was jutting out from one side of the pile, sticking out of a plastic bag from NSA. He walked over and picked it up, studying it for a moment as if it were something very dear and treasured. They were going to rebuild the Tonka Truck, at the government's expense, quite likely using some of the parts in the huge pile of stuff. The task was to start in the morning, and he sat there wondering if the cube in his hand should be a part of that effort. After the longest time, he walked across the room to the locked wall safe, opened it, and deposited inside it the cube that was 27648 terabytes of core memory out of a Revenge Mark 4 starship. "I'm just not ready right now," he whispered to it just before he closed the safe. "Maybe later." TO BE CONTINUED IN 'PAST PRESENCE' BOOK 7 OF DIMENSION OUT OF RANGE