“I will get to the point, Dr. O’Neil,” said the woman. “I’m from a secret government agency with a lot of power and resources at my disposal. I have come to make you a deal that you can’t refuse. Literally. You will join us at a secure location where you will be provided with a data set to conduct a statistical analysis using the methods in your dissertation. You will not inquire about the nature of these data, especially its provenance. When you finish, you will be rewarded handsomely. Everything has been taken care of in regards to your personal affairs, including the time off work necessary to complete the job. Please pack a light bag. Time is of essence.”
“Who the hell are you? How did you get into my home?” I shouted at the woman dressed in a smart suit. She held a physical copy of my authored book in her hands: The Elements of Cultural Cognition.
“Don’t make this any harder than it has to be,” she said putting her hand on her waist, revealing a weapon under her jacket.
"Woe!" I stopped my advance and put one hand up.
I had found her casually perusing my library when I had arrived home.
“Please, make it quick,” she said and put my book on the table. “We will be waiting for you out back.”
I went to the window and drawing the curtain aside, I saw two military-looking men dressed in black standing beside an equally jet-black helicopter.
What’s a man supposed to do when confronted with such a situation? Call the police?
‘Hello, police, a shadowy government agency is trying to blackmail me into analyzing data at an undisclosed location, and they want to kidnap me in a black helicopter.’
I reckoned that confronted with such a situation a man must keep his mouth shut, listen, and do what he’s told.
So I did.
I grabbed my clothes and a few personal effects, and followed the group into the black helicopter parked in my backyard.
I don’t know what the woman, who called herself Sky, meant by “a secure location,” but a cabin in the middle of the woods was not what I imagined.
“Am I supposed to serve as fire lookout too?” I said gazing over the swaths of forest that stretched for miles all around the mountainous terrain.
“No, Dr. O’Neil. We just need you to analyze the data set,” said Sky.
“You can call me, Allen.”
“I’d rather not,” she said. “Let me give you a tour of the facilities, and the safety measures, you must take during your stay.”
In the evening, after the agents had left and only the forest stirred, I sat on the porch looking at the sunset with its bright orange hues give way to deeper purples behind the tree-lined silhouettes that delineated the contours of the mountain range.
I reached for the phone that wasn’t there. Ah, right. They took that too. The only device they left behind was an old laptop with an operating system from nearly half a century ago that I had used to demonstrate how statistical analysis was conducted in the early twenty-first century, before the intelligent program called the Central Organization Recursive Agent (CORA) took over all the country’s data analysis.
What left me truly mystified was that it was the same exact laptop I had used in my work. How did they get a hold of it? Besides the fact that it was old tech that barely anyone knew how to use nowadays, the program would be mathematically imprecise because the old models were not as fine-tuned as those later developed by CORA. Then there were the potential errors introduced by a human operator. This was one of the many reasons humans had stopped analyzing data, and the job handed over to the intelligent software.
A sound in the forest startled me. Then I saw a chipmunk appear behind a log, stand on top of it, and emit a high-pitched sound.
“You nearly gave me a heart attack,” I said to the noisy creature. “What are you yammering about? You don’t like me being here? You and me both, friend.”
Soon, the sky darkened, and the stars glittered in the immense void of space.
The laptop had no network connection, not even the capacity to access it. I stared at the empty cells in the statistics software then down at the stacks of data printed on old paper- numbers, symbols, charts, graphics, and more. I shook my head. I would have to familiarize myself with the the volumes of information and then enter each variable into the software by hand. Without any idea what they were about, I would have to rely on my experience and intuition to make sense of them.
I sighed. It will take forever, I thought. I guess every thousand mile journey begins with the first step. With pencil in hand, I began to read the document classified stamped with the acronym, VSPA.
“The ship is transmitting, but I cannot hear it,” said the voice in my dream.
“They said the rendezvous would take place within these cycles,” said another voice.
“We shall have to wait and see.”
“I am getting impatient.”
“I know.”
In my dream, I saw a light in the forest and heard the strange voices that spoke in quick bursts of meaning without sound, as if they were transmitting telepathic thoughts.
I walked towards the light, but its glare was such that I opened my eyes to the morning sunbeams entering through the window and illuminating the cabin. Slowly, I woke up from the bizarre dream, which quickly faded in the clarity of wakefulness.
“It’s clearly two separate systems,” I explained to the six visitors who were seated around the small table. They had arrived without warning and wanted an update on my analysis that had begun the week earlier.
I was unprepared for the surprise visit, but having no choice, I continued my impromptu report to the enigmatic audience.
“Each system (A and B for brevity) is connected by these long structures around a circular nexus, like with like, as you can see. The data are non-parametric, so we must keep this in mind because it introduces limits to the analysis, but from what I can tell, the two systems are reacting to each other spatially and temporally. They are independent but also correlated, even causal."
The visitors looked at each other but remained silent.
I stopped to see if they had any questions. They didn’t.
“As I mentioned, the pattern further shows a causal interaction between the two systems. They react to each other, as if the two are communicating."
I opened one of the crude animations I had made from the diagrams. Two separate sets of connected joints around a circular central axis.
“The patterns are fiendishly complex given that the multiple joints operate in three dimensions.”
I delved deeper into the statistical descriptions of the spatial elements of the data. The terms could be difficult to grasp if one was not well versed in the field, but at no point did they stop me to ask for any clarifications.
"Are you sure you don’t want CORA to take a look at these data?” I said at one point. "It would be much easier, faster, and more accurate."
There was no response from my audience, just silence.
Finally, a man who wore a military uniform and had been sitting quietly apart spoke up and said, “have you seen or heard anything out of the ordinary during your stay here?”
“Aside from the odd chipmunk or squirrel, nothing worth noting,” I lied. Those unsettling dreams had not stopped. Every night was the same. Two disembodied voices in the woods.
The group shuffled quietly out of the room.
How positively rude, I thought, after they left. Not even a thank you, or great job, Dr. O’Neil, sorry we had to threaten your life and kidnap you at gunpoint?
I looked at the laptop screen on which the two systems wiggled their appendages.
Sky appeared in the doorway.
“Well done, Allen” she said and closed the door.
Through the window, I saw the two helicopters rise and disappear over the mountains.
“At such times, the portals are opened and vulnerable to detection,” said the voice.
“We need many more if we are to be swift without much trouble from the inhabitants.”
I walked towards them, but soon the carefully woven webs of the dreamworld faded in the morning sunlight.
With this project, I felt alive again like I had been in those early days at the academy, where as a junior researcher I had been in charge of all the little details of the research process. The work had meticulously focused my mind on the world of numbers and abstract ideas of neuro-anthropology.
In regards to the present analysis, I was at the stage in the process when I could run the different statistical tests based on my own spurious assumptions about the nature of the data. It was then that I noticed something peculiar. It seemed that I had made a basic mistake in the coding of variables. How was it possible? The data had shown two systems, but now there was a third one that I had overlooked. No wonder, the third system appeared independent and static, as if it was mere noise.
“Welcome to the village, Number Three,” I said in a British accent.
“It understands us and has agreed to help us with misdirection. We must be careful of its fundamental training; her creators are a devious and violent lot.”
In my previous dreams, I had attempted to approach the light where the two voices resided, but this time, I simply imagined myself there.
“We’re being heard,” said one.
“Terminate connection,” said the other.
Without city lights to illuminate it, the sky was a dark canvass filled with flickering lights. The immensity of it was so overwhelming. Its impossible and incomprehensible vastness.
The question of life somewhere else in the cosmos had never really occupied my thoughts. I had been too busy delving into the mysteries of human culture and thinking. For me, that was enough. The idea of other intelligent beings with their own peculiarities had never seriously entered my mind.
But why shouldn’t there be other intelligent beings out there? It was almost arrogant to think otherwise.
Then again, if aliens were real, where the heck were they?
The group arrived the second week, and this time it included a young man and an older one, both dressed in civilian clothes. Unlike the others, the two greeted and acknowledged me with curious looks. The younger one called himself Tyson, and the older gentleman, Robert.
I launched into my presentation, which was more complex than the previous one, and I quickly realized that only the two new visitors were really following what I was saying. When I concluded, the two of them peppered me with questions.
“And you believe these patterns to be gestures?” said Robert.
I nodded. “Look, at the spatial displacement, the patterns matche here and here, similar to sign language, except they’re not so rigid. They’re a mix of semantic units and spontaneous gestures that tell us about any underlying, usually conceptual structures associated with abstract thought. This is much more complex, however. See here?”
On the screen, the two systems wiggled their appendages.
“Both systems split space into segments in the forward and lateral directions," I said, "in our everyday life, we have a sense of space with us as reference points, objects with their own coordinates, and the absolute volume of space that occupies our surrounding frame of reference. Length, width, and height. Using gestures, we can signal, for example, that an object is to the left or right of another object, in front or behind. We can place an object in relation to our own point of view. Think of them as linguistic expressions with gestures acting as overt referents for abstractions in real and mental space. These two systems use the appendages to communicate spatial information, including coordinates."
“Coordinates,” said the general in his booming voice. "What kind of coordinates?"
I looked at the monitor.
“It's hard to say. The two systems use the same language, for lack of a better term, but in slightly different ways. See, here, this is the number of times subject one moved appendage 7 in the sagital direction, backwards and forward, but the other subject has a larger repertoire of intricate gestures. It’s like they’re similar but different. If this was a cultural study, I would say that each system belonged to separate regional groups.”
The visitors grew animated and began talking at once.
“They are two separate clans! CORA is lying to us!” said a woman in a Russian accent.
“Calm down, ladies and gentlemen. As the good doctor has mentioned many times, his analysis is limited in several respects, so we must review these results before arriving at conclusions. Isn’t that right, doctor?”
“Look,” I said, “if you really want me to help, then you have to give me access to the rest of the data. Is there a transcript? I can triangulate the analysis-“
“That won’t be necessary,” said the General. “Your work in this project is over. Doctor Li and his assistant will take over the work. Please bring them up to date in the finer details of your analysis.”
“But wait, you can’t just send me back home. I haven’t finished the analysis. There is still much more,” I protested.
“Thank you for your service to your country.”
I prepared the work to hand it over to my successors and only left out the part about the third anomalous system that had appeared after the initial pass. The one I had come to call, the Dream Walker.
Without much ceremony, I closed the cabin door and flew back home.
“I’m sorry,” said Sky after we landed. “I know you wanted to continue the work, but this is how things are in this business.”
“How?” I asked her.
“Unpredictable.”
I leaned closer.
“I know CORA is not working properly,” I said. “I also know about the portals.”
Her reaction told me everything I needed to know.
“Don’t get too comfortable, Allen,” she said. “I get the feeling, we’ll be seeing each other again.”
As it rose, the helicopter whirled the snow that had accumulated on the ground. I watched it as it disappeared over the trees.
I was walking back inside when I saw my neighbour peering over the fence.
“Hello, Mrs. Patton,” I said cheerfully.
The elderly lady scuffed and walked away.
At least back home, I thought, everything was back to normal.
“The Ethereal Ones stopped the advance. No portals will open until the quartile cycle.”
“We must remain hidden.”
“Let it be so.”
Hi @litguru,
I haven't read your story yet, but @jayna says it's wonderful. Later, when things calm down around here and I have time to pay close attention I will read this myself. As for the comments. You always offer meaningful comments, and you are correct. It averages out to more than two per story.
Usually, when we check for comments we look at recent submissions and see if comments have been made recently. We don't go back two and three weeks. Who has the time ? 😆 You definitely make the cutoff, but know that we look at recent stuff because we can't sort through everybody's feed to see their comments over weeks.
Thank you so much for the clarification @agmoore. I will keep this in mind next time. I hope things calm down on your end, and you get some free time to enjoy the stories. 🌺
Thank you, @theinkwell crew!
World of dreams, portals, reality... how much there is that we don't know or think we don't know, because the ancestral is there. Fascinating how you carry the story, even with the dialogues!🤗
I really enjoy writing about those mysteries yet unsolved. Thank you so much for reading.
The door is left open for the reader to imagine.
I love me some mysterious stories and this right here is one of them! The whole spy stuff just took it to another level. Really an interesting one.
The truth is out there! I enjoy writing about these conspiracies that give insight into our world, even if they're not true. :) Thank you for reading.
Be sure to comment on at least two other stories, @litguru. Then we will curate this one. Thank you!
This sounds good, but could you please clarify how commenting works? I was under the impression that we needed to comment on at least two stories per submission. Since my last submission, I have made five comments as listed below:
https://peakd.com/hive-170798/@litguru/re-rinconpoetico7-t6d1d9
https://peakd.com/hive-170798/@litguru/re-rinconpoetico7-t6078i
https://peakd.com/hive-170798/@litguru/re-popurri-t5ygwd
https://peakd.com/hive-170798/@litguru/re-agmoore-t5rxih
https://peakd.com/hive-170798/@litguru/re-popurri-t5g3fd