Descent (11 page)

It took the aliens until the 1970s to fine-tune the spatial distortion tech to the point where they could lift people straight out of their beds from under the covers and space-warp them directly aboard the saucers without regard for material obstacles. After this breakthrough abductions went, so to speak, through the roof. From then on there was no stopping them, and nothing to stop the CIA finding out everything it wanted about anything and anyone on Earth.

The documents were a work of art. Besides the apparent physical authenticity of the forgeries, plenty of rabbit holes for the conspiracy minded were scattered unobtrusively in the text. For instance, the documents alluded to the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, and hinted at the involvement of Aleister Crowley, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and L. Ron Hubbard, all of whose names appeared in transparently disguised form. There was a passing reference to the (in 1943) young naval officer John F. Kennedy, as being in on the truth but a possible long-term security risk because of his (in 1955) political ambitions. There was even a brief mention in a footnote of a plan to build a trans-Atlantic guidance system concealed inside tall twin towers on Manhattan Island.

Within months, the whole preposterous farrago had been debunked. In the meantime, according to some in a position to know, the rumours about it, and the hard, public evidence of frantic efforts by the US authorities to recover the documents and suppress and discredit the story (thus, of course, multiplying its credibility) had wound up the Russians and Chinese something wonderful, to say nothing of what it did to the French.

I finished reading the most recent summary of that particular story one midnight. After I’d closed the site I found myself wondering how much of it I’d known before. A quick scan back through my data stash confirmed that in my embarrassingly naïve pubescent fumblings with the UFO mythos a few years earlier I’d encountered an earlier draft of the tale from before its dubious provenance had been exposed. Thinking back, I recalled being particularly excited by the idea that human beings were already out there among the stars, some of them riding in our very own starships, others perhaps taken there centuries or millennia ago by the real aliens, the Greys. I’d even seized on the latter possibility as an explanation for the Nordic-looking ‘Space Brothers’ reported by the early-1950s flying-saucer contactees.

Was this, then, the origin of some of the details of my dream? It seemed all too plausible an explanation. I shut down my screen and pushed my chair back carefully so as not to wake anyone. I backed down the stair-ladder for a final pee before turning in, pondering all the while. As I crept back up the creaking steps with the sound of the re-filling cistern like a torrent in my ears, I had a sudden thought that made me freeze at the top of the landing, then scurry to the illusory shelter of the duvet with a shiver between my shoulder blades.

What if the story were true? What if it wasn’t disinformation at all, but perhaps an unwittingly leaked truth hastily covered up by making it
look
like disinformation? In that case, my experience might have been more real – and more deceptive – than I’d thought. The Space Brother and the Space Sister might just be US naval personnel, and their tale some bizarre psychological ploy. The detail that I’d found myself wearing my clothes when I was in the ship indicated that the experience couldn’t have been entirely as it had seemed – or did it? If they had technology that could warp me from under a duvet and through a solid ceiling and roof, surely they could warp me into my clothes as well!

At this point I told myself very firmly not to be ridiculous, and went to sleep.

On subsequent late nights of fruitless research the disturbing thought returned, but by and large I kept my thinking rational, and well within the bounds of the Defence Technology Hypothesis. The DTH made a lot of sense to me, as did the distinct but compatible – and likewise well-supported – hypothesis of ESB: electromagnetic stimulation of the brain.

In laboratory settings, magnetic fields had been shown to induce a strong sense of invisible presences, feelings of limbs being tugged, and religious and spiritual experiences whose content depended very much on the subject’s prior expectations and beliefs. Some UFOs did seem to be natural plasma phenomena less well understood even than ball lightning, and it was quite possible that encounters with such things could induce the sort of weird hallucinations that go down in UFO lore as ‘high strangeness incidents’. It was also possible that some of the advanced aircraft and drones postulated by the DTH had strong electromagnetic fields of their own, so they too could generate high strangeness episodes during or after the encounter.

This, I reckoned, was what had happened to me. I could even explain to my own satisfaction why I’d had a weird mental state and a disturbingly real dream afterwards and Calum hadn’t. I didn’t quite believe his tale about his forebears, but I did suspect it had a grain of truth. Most people whose ancestors moved out of Africa in prehistoric times have a few per cent Neanderthal, Denisovan and other not-quite human genes in their DNA. One thing we can be fairly sure of about Neanderthals: they didn’t have much in the way of religion. They buried their dead in ways that can be interpreted as evidence of a belief in an afterlife – a handful of flowers, a smudge of ochre – but that’s all. They left no trace of worship: no shrines, no images, no sacrifice sites. They didn’t have the god gene. There’s a part of the human brain, the temporal lobe, that is associated with religious experiences as well as with epilepsy, and it’s the same part that responds to electromagnetic stimulation with hallucinations, often of good or evil presences.

If Calum’s paternal ancestors happened to have more than the usual share of Neanderthal genes – and one glance at him or his father was enough to raise the thought, even with a smile – then perhaps he was missing the god gene, and therefore the brain module that it usually built. His temporal lobe would be less likely than mine to respond to electromagnetic stimulation from a close encounter with a UFO – natural or artificial – with trances, dwams, hallucinations, moments of religious mania and strange, vivid dreams.

So far, so rational. I could have left it there. I should have. I didn’t.

Instead, I worked out my own conspiracy theory in that obsessive couple of weeks. My very own paranoid explanation. My way to make sense of what had happened to me, and what hadn’t happened to Calum.

It was this.

The DTH, it seemed to me, needed to be given another twist, taken to another level. The twist was that if the US and its allies had aircraft and UAVs that stimulated the god module, then they must know that they did. They could hardly
not
know. And in that case, wasn’t it possible that they didn’t just write it down as a sometimes useful side effect, but they actively exploited it?

Perhaps having a UFO experience wasn’t, by a long way, the commonest response to an encounter with a UFO. Over vast areas of the world, people who got an electromagnetic kick to the god module wouldn’t meet
aliens
. They’d meet angels, or demons, or departed saints, or, for that matter, gods or God. These same vast areas were precisely the ones over which the US was striving to maintain its influence. Most of the opposition to that influence was articulated as religion where it wasn’t articulated as godless communism. Quite possibly, having prophets and visionaries pop up with new and disruptive revelations in, say, Iran or China, was very much a win for the US.

Something similar might be going on, or at least being tried out, in the secular West. Right across Europe and North America, we’d supposedly been on the brink of revolution for as long as I could remember. Somehow we’d never gone over that brink, nor had we stepped – or been pulled – far back from it. The crisis had never been resolved. It just went on and on. The revolutionaries did their worst, and every now and then there would be riots or marches or general strikes, and then it all fizzled out until the next time.

What if the US and other Western governments were experimenting with inducing religious and/or UFO experiences in their own populations? As a distraction, perhaps, or as a way of dividing their populations before they could unite against the endless depression? It seemed a risky tactic, I had to admit, but then so was arming jihadists, and they’d been doing that for decades, blowback be damned. The real beauty of my conspiracy theory was that it took the riskiness into account: some elements or factions within whatever agencies were behind this scheme were worried about the dangers of religious or cultist extremism, and were subtly subverting the project, perhaps by varying the electromagnetic effects to stimulate other parts of the brain than the god module.

That was why my encounter had induced a vision (rooted, perhaps, in my earlier speculations) of a Space Brother and a Space Sister in old style
Star Trek
uniforms with a message to match: rationality, science and secular humanism. They’d said that message was for me. For all I knew, they could be right. I might be the only one it had reached.

I suppose I already had a wish to believe, despite daily evidence to the contrary, that some at least of the rulers of the world were rational, knew what they were doing and meant well. I conjured a romantic image of a cabal of beleaguered liberal humanists under deep cover in the deep state, a secret band of brothers (and sisters) who strove to use their power for the greater good.

With the world to choose from, they had chosen me.

Why they would have chosen a sixteen-year-old schoolboy to be the great teacher of the stunning revelation that we needed no revelation was a question that, to my credit, gave me pause. Rather less to my credit, it didn’t give me pause for long.

I figured they knew what they were doing.

That embarrassing conspiracy theory I mentioned earlier – elaborate, tenuously supported, self-centred and self-serving?

This isn’t it.

Working out my own conspiracy theory took less time than you might expect, but more than I could afford in the run-up to my Highers. In the fortnight after the encounter, I stayed awake far too late every night, even after I’d gone to bed, exploring the endlessly branching warren of UFO rabbit holes on my phone. My nightly reimaginings of the sexual element of the abduction experience didn’t help. Nor did the false awakenings, in which I relived the terrifying presence of the Grey in the room. The second Saturday after the encounter, I woke in mid-morning light to see a looming figure in the bedroom’s shadowy doorway. For once, I wasn’t immobilised by sleep paralysis. I sat bolt upright, hands out in front of my face, with a dry-throated scream. My mother yelped as she slopped the mug of hot tea she’d carried upstairs for me.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ she asked, putting the mug on the table and dabbing at her wrist with a tissue.

‘You woke me from a bad dream,’ I said.

‘Don’t say that like it’s my fault.’

‘Sorry,’ I mumbled. I sipped the tea. ‘I didn’t mean it that way.’

‘Hmph! Just doing something nice for you, and I get yelled at. You scared me.’

‘I didn’t know it was you,’ I said, sounding more whiny than I could stand.

She put her lips to her wrist as if to kiss herself better. ‘I’ll have to run this under a cold tap.’

Her steps sounded heavy on the stair-ladder. I sat in bed, hands around the mug, feeling sorry for myself, then got up. I spent the rest of the morning studying, and clomped down for Saturday lunch – another odd family habit – when my mother shouted up the stairs about one o’clock.

Marie was not long back from Glasgow for the weekend. My dad was in from the back garden, having picked the early greens that went into the pitta breads my mum had made and that lay steaming in a heap in the middle of the table by the potato and nettle soup tureen, fragrant with coriander. I mumbled hellos and munched away, keeping half an eye on the television above the fireplace. The sound was off and I followed the scrolling subtitles. Nothing much was going on in the world, I was relieved to see. Iranian terrorists had just wiped out a US patrol in Tehran. Heavy rain was forecast for the coming Tuesday. The fallout count was not expected to rise as a result. The Russian and US naval build-up in the Caribbean was the highest since the Cuban missile crisis; likewise in the North Sea, the Mediterranean and the Gulf, with French and British ships adding to the maritime traffic jam. The European Central Bank was into its second week of talks with the International Monetary Fund. There was going to be a general strike. The latest batch of exoplanets found had edged the known total to over ten thousand. I smiled to myself at the thought of US naval bases on scores of them. What could the Iranian resistance do about that?

‘Honestly, Ryan!’ my mum snapped.

I chewed and swallowed. ‘What?’

‘You didn’t hear what I said?’

‘Sorry, no.’

‘I’m fed up with the way you’re acting more and more like a lodger.’ She glanced sideways at Dad, looking for support.

Dad nodded. ‘You should make more of an effort, Ryan. You haven’t seen Marie for a week and you haven’t said a word to her.’

‘Not that I’m complaining,’ Marie said.

I ignored this.

‘Sorry, Mum, what did you ask?’

‘I asked what you’re doing this afternoon.’

‘A bit of revision,’ I said.

‘And this evening?’

I grimaced and laughed, shrugging. ‘A bit more, I suppose.’

‘No, you’re not,’ said Mum. ‘This afternoon you’re going to help your father in the garden, and this evening you’re going down to the Westender to meet your friends.’

I stared at her. ‘Why? You’re always telling me I need to buckle down and revise for my exams.’

‘Yes, but not when you’re turning pale and silent and sullen. You need to get out and relax a bit. You haven’t even been out to share revision work for weeks.’

For two weeks, in fact, but I wasn’t going to point that out.

‘I thought you liked visiting Sophie’s,’ added my mum, with a sly look. ‘You haven’t even had your pal Calum drop by for ages.’