Monster (eBook)

CHAPTER 1

“So…what the hell is that thing?”

The two men crouched over a digitized signal that had been reinterpreted and displayed on the 35-inch monitor before them. For long minutes, the young man with glasses had been cleaning up the distorted image with the intuitive software and redefining the resolution. Only within the last few moments had the image become sufficiently clear enough to make out the faintest of images.

“Beats the hell out of me, boss,” Rob said. His right and left hands rested on two large balls, seated within the console board. He wore a speech digitizer at his throat, one of the latest modifications of the old earphone and headset. He was squinting at the individual pixels of color on the screen he was attempting to fragment and redefine – alternating between increasing the pixel, fragmenting, redefining and then slamming them back into place with blinding speed. After a few more moments of working at that speed, the computer picked up on what he was attempting to accomplish and took over the fragmentation and redefinition of the signal.

“Maxine…continue,” he said and the computer raced along at an even greater speed, continuing to alternate between opening up, enlarging and cleaning up individual pixels from the signal being fed into it and dropping them back into place.

“So, how much longer is this going to take before we know what we got?” the older man standing over his shoulder asked. The lollipop stick in his mouth had been chewed to a nub, and now he stood impatiently gnawing on what was left with a passion.

“Miles, look, it takes as long as it takes. I know how bad you really want this. Why don’t you go have a cup of coffee and I’ll page you when I get something we can talk about, okay?”

Straightening up, Miles looked down at the young man.

“You think I’m bad now? I don’t think you wanna see me after another cup of coffee,” he said. “Just call me when you got something.” He walked to the glass door of the console booth and yanked it open. As he was leaving, he finished with, “You know where I’ll be.”

As soon as he hit the hallway, NASA Administrator Miles Washington, Jr. looked down towards his office. There were many people walking in and out of a conference room across the hall from his door with stacks of reports and notebooks in their arms. A few of them congregated in the hallway, talking loudly and gesticulating wildly. A rather stout woman was trying to shout down two of the three men surrounding her and gesturing with a chopping motion of her hand.

“It’s got to stop right here!” she shouted. “Right here! Right here! Right here!”

“No, no, no, no, no, no, no!” another man shouted. “It makes no difference now! It doesn’t make any goddamned difference now! Everybody knows something’s going on!”

“Right!” another man shouted. “What are we trying to hide? What’s to keep quiet?”

Miles walked up to the group holding the bridge of his nose between his fingers, his headache growing. As soon as he got close, the stocky woman burst through the group and stormed over to him. The two men who had been arguing followed close behind, determined not to let the woman have her way with the boss.

“Miles! Miles!” the woman shouted. “We’ve got to contain this, right here!”

“No way! Miles! We have to set up a press conference immediately! We need publicity! This is unprecedented! We need to milk this thing as much as possible! We can’t afford to lose a chance to lobby for more funding!”

Amid all the yelling, Miles attempted several times to interject and try to quiet the group. Fighting now amongst themselves, Miles had little chance of settling the argument amicably.

“Alright! Alright!” he yelled over them. The little group quieted immediately. Looking at each of them, he continued in a hushed tone of voice. “Alright. I don’t have anything else right now. Let the papers report whatever they want. It’s good for business anyway. We don’t need to say anything to anybody until we know something for sure. If you want to put out a story, just tell the press that we can confirm Dr. Lindstrom’s sighting, but we have no comment about what it is. I still don’t know what’s going on, but just as soon as we get something, we’ll call a press conference. I don’t know any more than you all do right now. I’ll keep in touch, though, okay?”

Miles brushed past the three, heading to his office, and they continued arguing in a much quieter tone, but with no less vehemence. Standing outside of the office door, Deputy Administrator Doug Farrell, a weasely little man – rather short, balding, excitable - was patiently waiting with his arms crossed and a big grin on his face. Putting his hand on the shoulder of the grinning man, he asked, “Whatcha got, Doug?”

Doug slowly opened the office door for effect. Miles looked in and noticed a young Asian man, thirtyish, sitting nervously in a chair in front of his desk, toying with his fingers. As Miles walked in, the man immediately stood up and faced him, clearly terrified. Miles sauntered around his desk and sat down in his chair, leaning back. Doug shut the door just as Miles rocked back in his creaky chair. The young man slowly sank back onto the edge of his seat looking back and forth between the two men.

“This young man you see before you is the notorious Sandman,” Doug gloated.

Miles looked the young man up and down. Sitting before the boss, he was visibly shaken and nervously shifted his gaze from his shoes to Miles.

“The Sandman, huh? You worked with the Watch, right? You the guy the CIA picked up and hired after cracking some communications satellite codes?”

“Y-Yes, sir,” he stammered.

Not to be left out of the conversation, Doug jumped in, volunteering even more information to make matters worse.

“Yep, the Sandman - aka Allen Fukagawa. Picked him up after the agency lost a majority of their funding. We’ve had him in communications for the past six months. Looks like he’s branched out, though.” Doug smiled that little “cat-that-just-ate-the-milk” look and simply rocked back and forth on his heels with his arms crossed for effect.

Miles wasn’t really into guessing games and really hated it when Doug pulled this, so he decided to focus his attention on the young man in front of him.

“So, what has our Sandman been up to?” He tapped on his desk as he waited. Miles knew this was annoying as hell to whomever he happened to be meeting. The effect was a kind of slow torture he had perfected, designed to intimidate and extricate information.

“I was just doing a favor for Dr. Lazure,” Allen spurted out. “He said it would be all right! He told me it had been cleared!”

Miles looked over at Doug who had been grinning so hard, Miles thought he could chew on his own ears. “Yeah. Leisure. Again,” Doug quipped.

Leisure was the nickname Cape Canaveral had given Dr. Lawrence “Larry” Lazure, an “exo-biologist” who had been on three previous space shuttle flights performing tests on plant and animal life in outer space. He was also very fond of playing practical jokes on his crewmates and coworkers over the computer network. There had been a kind of running battle between Dr. Lazure and Doug “The Weasel” Farrell, pitting Miles in the middle constantly. The rules of the game were simple: Dr. Lazure would run a scam or a gag making Doug look really bad and Miles would have to referee unprovable charges by his second-in-command against the doctor. All in all, it was extremely tiresome following up on the charges, mainly because no one talked. No one was willing to risk losing his or her source of recreation and certainly no one really cared for the Weasel anyway. If there was any one person who desperately needed torturing, it was Doug Farrell – the little Napoleon who envisioned himself running the entire NASA organization one day. Dr. Leisure was a local hero, and no one – but no one – was going to lift a finger to aid in his downfall, much less to help someone they admittedly hated.

“What was cleared?” Miles asked pointedly.

Tap…tap…tap…tap…tap…tap…tap.

He could tell that the incessant tapping was unnerving the young man even more, judging by his hesitation to speak.

So he tapped harder.

The tapping was very nearly physically painful to Allen. He winced at the noise, knowing full well he had been caught red-handed, and he was going to have to give up Dr. Lazure. He slumped into the chair with his head down and sighed.

At the sigh, Miles stopped tapping and looked up at Doug who had been watching the entire scene from the door, grinning like a Cheshire cat.

“Well?” he asked impatiently.

“I caught Mr. Sandman here rewiring some of the I/O ports to our communications modules. Seems he was making some rather ‘unique’ modifications,” he replied with too much enthusiasm.

Allen continued to look at his feet. He shook his head as if to say ‘I can’t believe this.’

Never one to stop beating a dead horse, Doug volunteered more information.

“He was, I’m told, making some changes to the fiber optic lines that included a satellite uplink module.”

“Which lines?” Miles demanded.

Without hesitation, Doug replied, “The shuttle lines.”

Miles’s brow furrowed with concern.

“Oh really? I’m very interested to know what Dr. Lazure wanted you to do for him, seeing...