The Second Sphere
Chapter 22

Bryant left and I grabbed the chip, which sat on my desk, inserted it into the link-up, and opened the folder that popped up. There were tens of files, up and down, row upon row upon row. Shit, I thought. To look through all this could take hours.

I was ready for a long day of work, pouring through documents, searching through a haystack. I opened the first file in the first row, located in the upper left hand corner. It was encrypted with a rather simple language. I ran a Laslow translation program, which took all of forty-five seconds to turn indecipherable nonsense into something coherent. Then the file opened, and up sprang my video program.

At first, I thought there was something wrong with the link-up. The image before me was a stroke of red, with a bit of gray on the outer edges. The being was nothing more than a cloudy face. When I pressed play, a slow, raspy voice, clearly run through some distortion program, spoke. I could tell that this being was human. But I wasn’t sure whether it was a man or a woman.

The disembodied voice conversing with the unidentified subject was that of Victor Newberry. The two people spoke like buddies. They talked about their families and gossiped about celebrities, as though they were old friends meeting for coffee. But quickly, once Newberry lulled the person into a sense of camaraderie, he pounced.

“So, tell me about the Gagotrothes,” Newberry said. The name seemed as normal to him as mentioning the restaurant he dined in the previous evening. I’d never heard the word before and wondered whether Newberry made it up, or mispronounced another word with which I was more familiar. But the way the person across from him reacted, a trembling fog, I quickly realized that he neither made up the word, nor stumbled over its pronunciation.

“I’m not sure I can talk about them,” the person said. The person shuffled uncomfortably in their seat.

“We’ve gone through a lot of trouble to ensure your anonymity, to get you to this place so that we can interview you. Your identity is protected. TSG won’t be able to access any of this. I promise you that. We don’t have an unlimited amount of time to get this recorded. So please, tell us what you know.”

The person sighed and fidgeted. I wondered why he or she went to this trouble only to seize with fright. After a few moments of contemplation, though, the person settled into the seat. The person stopped moving and began to talk.

“We were first contacted by them about one hundred and seventy-five years ago. And by we, I mean the Three Spheres Government.”

“Is that how long they’ve been here?

“They’ve been here much longer than that, of course.”

“How long?” Newberry asked.

“We’ve never been able to figure that out.”

“Why did they contact the TSG?” The rapid-fire questions kept the distorted subject on the defensive, and all he did was spit back short answers.

“They wanted to make an introduction.”

“An introduction?” Newberry asked.

“They wanted to let us know that they were here and that they had been for some time.”

“How did they first make contact?”

“I’ve never been privy to that information.”

“Where are they from?” Newberry asked.

The person shifted, unable to find a comfortable position. “They originated in our solar system.”

“Are they from the Three Spheres?” Newberry asked.

“I’m not entirely sure,” the distorted person said. “However, they’ve spent the last fifteen centuries underneath the crust of a nearby planet, occasionally monitoring our status, conducting experiments and the like.”

I paused the interview. Was my lack of time at the Source starting to catch up to me? Or, was Vic Newberry interviewing a person whom he obviously considered a reliable source, who confirmed the existence of non-human entities on the Three Spheres? A smile popped on my face as I thought about this last act of Victor Newberry to trick the Laslow Corporation into believing absurd fantasies. I rubbed my eyes and pushed play again. Humor was always welcome.

“These beings are under our feet?”

“Currently? I’m not sure where the majority of their population is located.”

“And were they always there?”

“No, as I said, they went underground a while ago. Of course they weren’t the first we’ve encountered, but they are the first to desire a relationship with us.”

“And what was their purpose in making contact?”

“They want to return to the surfaces of the Three Spheres. And of course, they want to share in our resources,” the person said. “They wanted to work out an arrangement.”

“And to what extent have these creatures entered negotiations about coming back and getting our resources?” Newberry asked.

“The general parameters of resource allocation have been reached.”

“The TSG has reached an agreement with these Gagotrothes?”

“For all intents and purposes, yes,” the person said.

“And what are the benefits for the TSG?” Newberry asked.

“Two things. First, the creatures have helped facilitate attacks against high value Three Spheres targets in an effort to thin the population.”

“Thin the population?”

“Yes, the Gagotrothes suggested that resources might be better put to use if the population on the outer two spheres was cut.”

“I’m sorry,” Newberry said, “you’re saying that these Gagotrothes and the TSG are responsible for much of the violence that has been perpetrated against Three Spheres’ targets?”

“That’s what I believe to be true, yes,” the person said.

I paused the video again. This was ludicrous. There was something perverse about what this person said. In fact, it was quite sick. This intimation of TSG responsibility for the destruction of life was, if anything, libelous; a heinous smear that needed substantiation, not just the words of a blurry conspirator. I pressed play.

“And what else does the TSG get?”

“Advancements in technology that will benefit the population, which remains after the thinning.”

“Such as?”

“Technology that will help manipulate space time, weather patterns, and increase the durability of our Transfer technology.”

“That’s quite significant,” Newberry said.

“That’s why the TSG was so amenable to their offer.”

“Why don’t they just do it all at once? Destroy civilization on the outer spheres? Get it out of the way?”

“My guess is that the mass destruction of life on the moon and Mars would have an impact on their habitat as well.”

“And who knows about the Gagotrothes?” Newberry asked.

“Key members of the executive branch of the Three Spheres, and perhaps a few other key citizens.”

“And this communication, is it ongoing?”

“Yes.”

“How often?”

“I don’t know.”

“What is it? Every week? Once a month? What?” Newberry asked.

“All I can say is that there’s regular contact.”

Now, I understood why Newberry had been afraid, why he wanted protection.

But this couldn’t possibly be genuine. This was a set-up, an absurd concoction by a sick man. It was truly insane to create these fantasies, much less try to sell them as an indictment of the TSG. But regardless of what I thought at that moment, I needed to tell Bryant. I feared that he might laugh at me for believing such talk. For a moment, I worried that he would tell me to toss the chip and forget about anything on there.

And so I waited, trying to muster the gonads to get out of my seat. I reviewed the other ten videos that I found, all of which confirmed what was on the first. The squiggly faces and voices were slightly different, but their stories were, essentially, the same.

Aliens.

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