Post by dodoman1 on Mar 27, 2013 20:41:43 GMT
"Morning, sir!" I called to the dark-suited man standing outside the warehouse as I stepped toward him, away from my car.
He glanced up at me. His eyes were hidden behind a pair of aviator sunglasses.
"ID card, please," he said emotionlessly.
Nervously, I pulled my wallet from my pocket and fished out my card. He took it and scrutinized it carefully.
"Anderson?" he asked.
"Yep," I said brightly.
He looked back up at me disapprovingly.
"First day?" he asked.
"Uh, yes, yes sir it is."
He returned my card to me.
"Do you have your suit?"
"My... suit?"
"Your containment suit."
"Oh, yes, right. It's, uh, in my car." I backed up a few steps, anticipating a reaction. When there wasn't one, I turned around and headed back to my parked car.
I opened the back door and pulled out my containment suit. They were always very specific about the terminology. A containment suit. It was not a hazmat suit, and it was not a chemical suit. It was a containment suit.
It was nothing like any hazmat suit I had ever been in, either. It was a lot less baggy, with a hood that fit almost skintight over my head like a balaclava, and was sort of reddish-brown colored.
As I pulled the suit on over my work clothes, I looked back at the man standing in front of the door. He stared up at the sky, his face unreadable. I wondered how he could possibly function, wearing that suit in heat of the Nevada desert.
I zipped up the suit and walked back over to the man. I could already feel myself beginning to sweat.
"Doctor Kelly will meet you inside to show you around," the man said, stepping away from the door. I opened it and headed into the warehouse.
I was immediately greeted by a refreshing wave of cool, dry air. On either side of me was an enormous series of shelves that stretched almost to the ceiling of the airplane hangar-sized warehouse. The shelves were stacked with crates and boxes, some bigger than me and some the size of shoeboxes, made of wood, metal, and plastic. I heard what sounded like vehicles driving around.
A group of people in containment suits identical to mine passed by the space between the shelves. One of them noticed me and broke away from the group.
"Morning," he said, his voice largely muffled and his face largely obscured by his suit. "I'm Doctor Kelly."
"Hello, Doctor," I said, holding out my hand. "Agent Anderson."
He shook my hand.
"Agent Anderson. You're the new guy, right? This is your first day with the Bureau?"
"Yes sir it is."
"Come with me."
I followed him away from the door, into the interior of the warehouse.
"They tell you what you'd be getting into?" he asked.
"Um..."
I looked around the warehouse, at the thousands of crates lining its shelves and at the dozens of containment-suited personnel strolling around.
"They gave me a general idea. Said I was being assigned to a high-priority, ultra-secret facility."
Doctor Kelly chuckled. "Well, I'm sorry to say it's not nearly as glamorous as it sounds. We're really just a storage facility."
"That doesn't sound very high-priority, what do you store here?"
"I'll show you."
Doctor Kelly led me around a corner and down an aisle between a row of shelves and the warehouse wall. He grabbed a cardboard box off the shelf and pulled the top open before holding it towards me.
"Look," he said. "This one's safe."
I peered into the box. Inside was a reddish-pink branched clump of perfectly smooth stone spheres, about six inches across.
"What is this?" I asked.
"This is a crystal growth with non-cubic unit cells," he said.
I processed this information.
"A what?"
"I don't completely understand, either," Doctor Kelly responded. "I'm not a geologist. But I have talked to geologists, and they said that this doesn't occur on Earth."
"But... it's, right here."
"I know," Doctor Kelly said. "But it doesn't occur on Earth."
"On- So you're telling me this is from space?"
"Here," said Doctor Kelly, closing the box and putting it back on the shelf. "Let me show you something else." He perused the shelves for a moment before selecting another similarly-sized box and taking it down. I heard the box humming faintly.
"Don't touch this one," he said. "You'd probably be fine, but... just to be safe."
I lifted the lid of the box. I heard the humming at full volume, about as loud as an electric razor. The humming was coming from an eight-inch-long black slab that appeared to have been broken off of something larger.
"What is this?" I asked.
"No idea," he said. "Piece of something? We don't know. Also It's vibrating, we don't know why or how. We have to replace its box every month or so, because it vibrates right through the material."
"Where did you get this?"
"The Bureau found it in a field in Connecticut, in 1967."
I looked up at him.
"Is this also from space?"
"As far as we can figure."
I blinked.
"So this is a..." I trailed off. I didn't want to say what I was thinking.
"One more thing," Doctor Kelly said. He put the box back and picked up another one, similarly sized. He lifted the lid and pulled out a baseball-sized tangle of blue and purple wires.
"Do you know what that is?" I asked.
"Well," said Doctor Kelly, "Analysis indicates that they're intended to work similarly to fuses, like in a fuse box, but we haven't been able to get them to work. Electricity turns them into water."
"Water?"
"Yes, just regular water. Clear, ingestible water, 100 percent pure. They look like metal and are physically indistinguishable from metal, but they're evidently water."
"And these are also from space?" I asked.
"Again, as far as we can figure out, yes, they are. Oh, I forgot to mention they grow."
"Grow?"
"There were five little stubs when the Bureau found them, in some basement in Washington state in 2010. We left them in this box for a few years and they grew around each other into this ball. We periodically harvest samples for additional testing."
"So this was built by someone," I stated.
"Or some thing," interjected Doctor Kelly.
"Right, or... yeah, and so this is from space?"
"Yes."
"These were made... by something from space?"
"Yes they were."
I looked around the warehouse.
"Is this all-"
"Yes, Anderson," Doctor Kelly interrupted. "This is where the Bureau keeps all of its extraterrestrial artifacts."
"Oh my God," I said.
"I really wish they would brief people a little bit more," Doctor Kelly said jokingly. "They keep dumping flabbergasted new agents like you on me."
"Oh my God, this is amazing!" I said. "I mean, this is... this is really life-changing."
"People tend to think that."
"I mean, what- what all is here?" I asked excitedly.
"Well, most of the warehouse is General Containment," said Doctor Kelly, in the tone of someone who had explained this a thousand times before. "That's where we keep everything that isn't dangerous and that isn't identifiable as organic or inorganic. This is Inorganic Containment we're in right now, where we keep harmless minerals and technological devices. There's Organic Containment over there in the center, where we keep living things we've discovered, but unfortunately most of them don't remain alive in Earth's biosphere. And in the corner across from us is Hazardous Containment, where we keep all the things that might pose humans a physical danger."
He moved out of the aisle and pointed to the back corner of the warehouse.
"That's Incomprehensible Containment," he said. "That's where all the things that might pose humans a mental danger are kept."
"A mental danger?" I asked.
"Sure. Some of it more than others, of course. Remind me to show you the extraterrestrial polygon sometime. My eyes were crossed for a week."
"Oh," I said.
"And I suppose there's one more thing you need to know about, if you're going to work here."
Doctor Kelly led me out of the aisle and across the warehouse, into the opposite aisle. The center bottom shelf here was completely empty, except for one large metal crate about six feet long and two feet high.
Doctor Kelly pulled a medium-sized box from the shelf above the center bottom shelf and opened it. Without waiting for the go-ahead, I looked inside.
There was a large jagged chunk of white metal inside the box, with a series of triangular red symbols printed on it.
"It's radioactive," said Doctor Kelly. "Your suit will protect you, though."
"I'm imagining this is a piece of a spaceship," I said.
"Not just any spaceship," Doctor Kelly said. "It's the spaceship. The spaceship that crashed at Roswell in 1947."
"Really?" I asked. "That happened?"
"Yes. Unfortunately, that was before the Bureau was established, so the cover-up on that one was a little less than satisfactory."
Doctor Kelly put the box away and knelt down, looking at the crate on the bottom shelf.
"This is the single most important thing we have here," Doctor Kelly said grimly. "Take a look."
I knelt down next to him nervously.
He pushed a panel on one end of the box aside, revealing a glass screen, through which I could see the face of a mummified Grey Man alien.
Its skin was chalk-white and flaking, and its eyes had been removed. Its mouth hung open in a toothless grimace. I made a face of disgust, and Doctor Kelly laughed. He pulled the panel shut again.
"Any questions?" he asked, standing back up.
"Wh- I-" I stood back up and tried to gather my thoughts. "Why haven't we made contact yet?"
"We tried," Doctor Kelly said. "The Bureau sent communicative signals out for decades. They shut down recently."
"What? Why?" I asked indignantly. "We could- I mean, obviously I don't have to explain it to you, come on! We could learn so much! We could do so many things!"
Doctor Kelly sighed and put his hand on my shoulder.
"Let me explain something to you, Anderson," he said. "The Bureau has been collecting these meaningless outer-space knick-knacks - essentially, what amounts to alien trash - for decades now. And in that time, we've realized two things. One: everything we've ever found and collected has been completely worthless. It's either something dead, or a piece of something, or something that's broken that we can't figure out how to fix. Believe me, if we knew how to work the alien firearms in Hazardous Containment, every soldier in the US army would have one by now."
"But-"
"And two," continued Doctor Kelly, cutting me off, "Based on the properties of the pieces of space-garbage we have here, the things that live out there are so impossibly alien that peaceful communication is, in all likelihood, impossible. There's things out there that eat gamma rays and communicate with microwave bursts, walking crystal plants that build machines out of crystalline animal flesh, monoliths that speak, spiders made of hydrogen that live in the coronas of stars. Do you really think we'll have anything in common with them?"
"We can try," I said weakly.
Doctor Kelly reached down and slid the panel on the Grey's coffin back open.
"The Bureau's records indicate that this guy was dead on arrival," Doctor Kelly said. "The crash didn't kill him. He was already mummified. He had already lost his eyes."
He slid the panel shut again.
"This is a message to us," Doctor Kelly said. "We expected 'We come in peace'. We got this."
I stared at him in shock.
"Report to Doctor Dawson in the monitoring center outside for your assignment," Doctor Kelly said as he walked out of the aisle.
He glanced up at me. His eyes were hidden behind a pair of aviator sunglasses.
"ID card, please," he said emotionlessly.
Nervously, I pulled my wallet from my pocket and fished out my card. He took it and scrutinized it carefully.
"Anderson?" he asked.
"Yep," I said brightly.
He looked back up at me disapprovingly.
"First day?" he asked.
"Uh, yes, yes sir it is."
He returned my card to me.
"Do you have your suit?"
"My... suit?"
"Your containment suit."
"Oh, yes, right. It's, uh, in my car." I backed up a few steps, anticipating a reaction. When there wasn't one, I turned around and headed back to my parked car.
I opened the back door and pulled out my containment suit. They were always very specific about the terminology. A containment suit. It was not a hazmat suit, and it was not a chemical suit. It was a containment suit.
It was nothing like any hazmat suit I had ever been in, either. It was a lot less baggy, with a hood that fit almost skintight over my head like a balaclava, and was sort of reddish-brown colored.
As I pulled the suit on over my work clothes, I looked back at the man standing in front of the door. He stared up at the sky, his face unreadable. I wondered how he could possibly function, wearing that suit in heat of the Nevada desert.
I zipped up the suit and walked back over to the man. I could already feel myself beginning to sweat.
"Doctor Kelly will meet you inside to show you around," the man said, stepping away from the door. I opened it and headed into the warehouse.
I was immediately greeted by a refreshing wave of cool, dry air. On either side of me was an enormous series of shelves that stretched almost to the ceiling of the airplane hangar-sized warehouse. The shelves were stacked with crates and boxes, some bigger than me and some the size of shoeboxes, made of wood, metal, and plastic. I heard what sounded like vehicles driving around.
A group of people in containment suits identical to mine passed by the space between the shelves. One of them noticed me and broke away from the group.
"Morning," he said, his voice largely muffled and his face largely obscured by his suit. "I'm Doctor Kelly."
"Hello, Doctor," I said, holding out my hand. "Agent Anderson."
He shook my hand.
"Agent Anderson. You're the new guy, right? This is your first day with the Bureau?"
"Yes sir it is."
"Come with me."
I followed him away from the door, into the interior of the warehouse.
"They tell you what you'd be getting into?" he asked.
"Um..."
I looked around the warehouse, at the thousands of crates lining its shelves and at the dozens of containment-suited personnel strolling around.
"They gave me a general idea. Said I was being assigned to a high-priority, ultra-secret facility."
Doctor Kelly chuckled. "Well, I'm sorry to say it's not nearly as glamorous as it sounds. We're really just a storage facility."
"That doesn't sound very high-priority, what do you store here?"
"I'll show you."
Doctor Kelly led me around a corner and down an aisle between a row of shelves and the warehouse wall. He grabbed a cardboard box off the shelf and pulled the top open before holding it towards me.
"Look," he said. "This one's safe."
I peered into the box. Inside was a reddish-pink branched clump of perfectly smooth stone spheres, about six inches across.
"What is this?" I asked.
"This is a crystal growth with non-cubic unit cells," he said.
I processed this information.
"A what?"
"I don't completely understand, either," Doctor Kelly responded. "I'm not a geologist. But I have talked to geologists, and they said that this doesn't occur on Earth."
"But... it's, right here."
"I know," Doctor Kelly said. "But it doesn't occur on Earth."
"On- So you're telling me this is from space?"
"Here," said Doctor Kelly, closing the box and putting it back on the shelf. "Let me show you something else." He perused the shelves for a moment before selecting another similarly-sized box and taking it down. I heard the box humming faintly.
"Don't touch this one," he said. "You'd probably be fine, but... just to be safe."
I lifted the lid of the box. I heard the humming at full volume, about as loud as an electric razor. The humming was coming from an eight-inch-long black slab that appeared to have been broken off of something larger.
"What is this?" I asked.
"No idea," he said. "Piece of something? We don't know. Also It's vibrating, we don't know why or how. We have to replace its box every month or so, because it vibrates right through the material."
"Where did you get this?"
"The Bureau found it in a field in Connecticut, in 1967."
I looked up at him.
"Is this also from space?"
"As far as we can figure."
I blinked.
"So this is a..." I trailed off. I didn't want to say what I was thinking.
"One more thing," Doctor Kelly said. He put the box back and picked up another one, similarly sized. He lifted the lid and pulled out a baseball-sized tangle of blue and purple wires.
"Do you know what that is?" I asked.
"Well," said Doctor Kelly, "Analysis indicates that they're intended to work similarly to fuses, like in a fuse box, but we haven't been able to get them to work. Electricity turns them into water."
"Water?"
"Yes, just regular water. Clear, ingestible water, 100 percent pure. They look like metal and are physically indistinguishable from metal, but they're evidently water."
"And these are also from space?" I asked.
"Again, as far as we can figure out, yes, they are. Oh, I forgot to mention they grow."
"Grow?"
"There were five little stubs when the Bureau found them, in some basement in Washington state in 2010. We left them in this box for a few years and they grew around each other into this ball. We periodically harvest samples for additional testing."
"So this was built by someone," I stated.
"Or some thing," interjected Doctor Kelly.
"Right, or... yeah, and so this is from space?"
"Yes."
"These were made... by something from space?"
"Yes they were."
I looked around the warehouse.
"Is this all-"
"Yes, Anderson," Doctor Kelly interrupted. "This is where the Bureau keeps all of its extraterrestrial artifacts."
"Oh my God," I said.
"I really wish they would brief people a little bit more," Doctor Kelly said jokingly. "They keep dumping flabbergasted new agents like you on me."
"Oh my God, this is amazing!" I said. "I mean, this is... this is really life-changing."
"People tend to think that."
"I mean, what- what all is here?" I asked excitedly.
"Well, most of the warehouse is General Containment," said Doctor Kelly, in the tone of someone who had explained this a thousand times before. "That's where we keep everything that isn't dangerous and that isn't identifiable as organic or inorganic. This is Inorganic Containment we're in right now, where we keep harmless minerals and technological devices. There's Organic Containment over there in the center, where we keep living things we've discovered, but unfortunately most of them don't remain alive in Earth's biosphere. And in the corner across from us is Hazardous Containment, where we keep all the things that might pose humans a physical danger."
He moved out of the aisle and pointed to the back corner of the warehouse.
"That's Incomprehensible Containment," he said. "That's where all the things that might pose humans a mental danger are kept."
"A mental danger?" I asked.
"Sure. Some of it more than others, of course. Remind me to show you the extraterrestrial polygon sometime. My eyes were crossed for a week."
"Oh," I said.
"And I suppose there's one more thing you need to know about, if you're going to work here."
Doctor Kelly led me out of the aisle and across the warehouse, into the opposite aisle. The center bottom shelf here was completely empty, except for one large metal crate about six feet long and two feet high.
Doctor Kelly pulled a medium-sized box from the shelf above the center bottom shelf and opened it. Without waiting for the go-ahead, I looked inside.
There was a large jagged chunk of white metal inside the box, with a series of triangular red symbols printed on it.
"It's radioactive," said Doctor Kelly. "Your suit will protect you, though."
"I'm imagining this is a piece of a spaceship," I said.
"Not just any spaceship," Doctor Kelly said. "It's the spaceship. The spaceship that crashed at Roswell in 1947."
"Really?" I asked. "That happened?"
"Yes. Unfortunately, that was before the Bureau was established, so the cover-up on that one was a little less than satisfactory."
Doctor Kelly put the box away and knelt down, looking at the crate on the bottom shelf.
"This is the single most important thing we have here," Doctor Kelly said grimly. "Take a look."
I knelt down next to him nervously.
He pushed a panel on one end of the box aside, revealing a glass screen, through which I could see the face of a mummified Grey Man alien.
Its skin was chalk-white and flaking, and its eyes had been removed. Its mouth hung open in a toothless grimace. I made a face of disgust, and Doctor Kelly laughed. He pulled the panel shut again.
"Any questions?" he asked, standing back up.
"Wh- I-" I stood back up and tried to gather my thoughts. "Why haven't we made contact yet?"
"We tried," Doctor Kelly said. "The Bureau sent communicative signals out for decades. They shut down recently."
"What? Why?" I asked indignantly. "We could- I mean, obviously I don't have to explain it to you, come on! We could learn so much! We could do so many things!"
Doctor Kelly sighed and put his hand on my shoulder.
"Let me explain something to you, Anderson," he said. "The Bureau has been collecting these meaningless outer-space knick-knacks - essentially, what amounts to alien trash - for decades now. And in that time, we've realized two things. One: everything we've ever found and collected has been completely worthless. It's either something dead, or a piece of something, or something that's broken that we can't figure out how to fix. Believe me, if we knew how to work the alien firearms in Hazardous Containment, every soldier in the US army would have one by now."
"But-"
"And two," continued Doctor Kelly, cutting me off, "Based on the properties of the pieces of space-garbage we have here, the things that live out there are so impossibly alien that peaceful communication is, in all likelihood, impossible. There's things out there that eat gamma rays and communicate with microwave bursts, walking crystal plants that build machines out of crystalline animal flesh, monoliths that speak, spiders made of hydrogen that live in the coronas of stars. Do you really think we'll have anything in common with them?"
"We can try," I said weakly.
Doctor Kelly reached down and slid the panel on the Grey's coffin back open.
"The Bureau's records indicate that this guy was dead on arrival," Doctor Kelly said. "The crash didn't kill him. He was already mummified. He had already lost his eyes."
He slid the panel shut again.
"This is a message to us," Doctor Kelly said. "We expected 'We come in peace'. We got this."
I stared at him in shock.
"Report to Doctor Dawson in the monitoring center outside for your assignment," Doctor Kelly said as he walked out of the aisle.
