Flightsuit (4 page)

It was time for a catalyst. 

After eighteen months,
Hack's superiors at the NSA were losing confidence and this was a last, or possibly, if he were lucky, a near-last-ditch effort before the artifact and his leadership of the project were taken away.

The NSA assembled some of the nation's leading experts in metallurgy, chemistry, electronics and energy to review the plate-sized artifact discovered in the mountains of Eastern Tennessee.  The team's initial excitement and enthusiasm dissipated with the increasing frustrations and pressures of what
was proving to be an inscrutable puzzle.

The researchers initially welcomed the Agency and the hero of Cane Creek.  Like the rest of the country, they'd read of his previous missions like novels serialized in papers and news reports.  In the battle to acquire choice projects from a beleaguered FBI, the Agency made Hack into a larger than life, modern-day Davy Crockett, adventurous, brave, determined and
humble.    The humility angle covered Hack's repeated insistence that his involvement in several of the previous missions was being exaggerated with other agents playing a larger role in some than his own. 

He
repeatedly downplayed his role and emphasized other's efforts, but the Agency refused to declassify anyone else's involvement.  They declassified information supporting their narratives and prevented Hack from disclosing anything that countered.   Hack didn't see the process as building up his reputation, but as destroying it.  The Agency strip-mined what they needed from his life, and destroyed everything that mattered to him.

He lost long-term relationships with agents he'd known for years.  Embedded in terrorist groups, with dozens of irrational and highly unpredictable violent people, the other agents became his surrogate family.  They held close ranks as actors hiding themselves amidst plans of psychotic madmen.  Living lies, and pretending for weeks at a time, they relied on each other.  Hack thought those friendships would last forever, but there was no way to convince any of them that he'd fought against the Agency's efforts to transfer their achievements to him.   One-by-one he lost touch with each of them.

As his public personae increased, Hack felt diminished.  He
had
done great things.  He
had saved lives
, not just on the Cane Creek infiltration but on other missions.  He'd once been proud of his accomplishments.  But now, his actual accomplishments were so overwhelmed by the Agency's mythology, that the reality was less than the fiction.  As a field agent, pretending was his job.   Now, the Agency made his whole life a pretense.  He avoided talking about himself, which everyone attributed to his heroic humility.

E
verything he did reinforced the mythology.  He'd cut his finger cleaning the garage the weekend before his introduction to the research team. It wasn't anything serious.  He was always cutting or snagging himself on something.  For some reason, he was prone to accidents with anything sharp, just a little bit careless.  The most dangerous time was usually during the first few minutes of some outdoor project, before he'd settled in to work.  He'd be adjusting a saw blade, or using his hands to ram a post into the ground, opening packages or the like.  He had a knack for accidentally finding sharp edges.

When he was ten, his parents bought him a replica sword.  The first days after Christmas, rain preventing him from giving the sword a good swing.  He'd waited anxiously to play with it.  The first sunny day after Christmas, he'd rushed outside
to battle the tall weeds beyond the yard.  He'd chopped weeds for less than a minute before he executed a spinning slice down at a stubborn stalk.  He'd misjudged the stalk's resistance and sliced through it with too much extra force.  The blade creased the back of his calf as it swung full around.  They'd all made a trip to the emergency room.  He remembered his mother standing in the doorway as the nurse came in to scrub the cut.  She wore a robe over her pajamas.  She told the nurse, she was going to start calling him "Hack" instead of Henry.  They continued to laugh about it over the next week, calling him "Hack" as both tease and unsubtle reminder.  After a while, the name stuck. 

The news reporters heard th
is story from his mother while he was in the hospital.  Every time people saw a bandage on him, they laughed in reference to the story.  It reinforced their belief that they knew him from the articles. 

The researchers chuckled and clapped him on the back in a friendly and familiar way when they saw the
bandaged finger.  They felt comfortable with the Hack they knew from the papers and TV stories. 

T
he public's knowledge of him through the media was almost a disguise in itself.  People felt they knew him from the stories and were slow to notice differences in the real man.  They'd ignore or rationalize any behavior that didn't mesh with their preconceptions. 

For Hack, this
aspect was comfortable and familiar.  He was still the infiltrator, standing apart from the others and looking in from the outside.

He'd seen the cracks forming in the research team from the outset.  Each of them was
an expert in their respective field.  Determined and serious-minded people with focus ingrained from childhood by parents, teachers, professors and peers.  They'd learned to avoid distraction and were impatient with time spent outside their own hypotheses and conclusions.

For the first few weeks, working for the NSA on a Top Secret project with expansive equipmen
t budgets and new offices was novelty enough.  As they settled in and became comfortable, pleasantries fell away in the rush to be the first to discover the strange artifact's properties and origin. 

Hack saw them as exceptional individuals with no concept of collaboration.  The initial excitement dragged into months with few conclusive findings.  After eighteen months, Hack decided the logjam was too tight to break on its own. 

Timeshare Counsel, Inc. was going to break it for him.

Timeshare Counsel, Inc. rose to prominence as one of the government's pet think tanks.  In the past four years the company developed a reputation for creative insights, problem solving and confidentiality.  Where other organizations developed success by going deep in a specific area, like military nanotech, infiltration techniques, or dozens of other specialties government bureaucrats needed, Timeshare's specialty was its expansive scope.  They chose projects in healthcare, data mining, manufacturing, transportation, city design and a wide array of military interests.

The research team arrived minutes before and had already been escorted into Timeshare's conference rooms by the time Hack stepped out of his own black Suburban.  He carried the artifact in a black backpack.  His security team was stationed all around Timeshare's brownstone building, including Richards on the rooftop with a sniper rifle.  He passed Walker on the sidewalk, ambitious and talented, she was his second
-in-command.

"Squared away, Major," Walker said as he passed, watching both ends of the street for activity.  There was no sign that any
one outside the Agency was were aware of the artifact, but no one wanted to risk its loss.  It was, to anyone's knowledge, one of a kind.

Hack had been to Timeshare twice before, once for the initial meeting with Taylor and once with his team
as they planned this excursion.  It was well-secured, for a non-military operation, to comply with prospective client's confidentiality needs.  Agent Sowyer sat behind three computer monitors, reviewing feeds from deployed drop cameras.  There were six additional security monitors on the desk to his left.  These were monitored by Timeshare's own security staff. 

"Building is secure, Major," said Sowyer, without looking up.

The research team was already seated when Hack entered the conference room.  There were two seats left.  Taylor would sit at the head.  Three touchscreen monitors were recessed into the table for him there.  Hack stepped in front of the remaining seat beside Taylor's empty chair. 

Hack didn't want to sit and then bounce back up to meet Taylor so he stood beside the chair and looked to the door.  In his earpiece, Sowyer told him Taylor was en route.

Theodore, "Ted" Taylor was Timeshare's President and Founder.  He'd spun Timeshare off from
Berc, Inc. almost seven years earlier.  Berc was one of the big six consulting firms in the country.  Timeshare quickly developed a reputation for solving deadlocked challenges.  Taylor employed a dozen other executive-level consultants with just under a hundred support staff.  His personal participation in most sessions declined over the years.  Now he usually sat in only for introductions and left session leadership to his execs. 

He chose only a few projects each year to participate in himself.  Those clients paid substantially larger rates for his involvement. 

Taylor dressed expensively.  He entered the conference room with a placid, self-assured smile.  He shook hands with Hack and motioned they sit down.

During introductions, Taylor smiled and congratulated each of the researchers on some aspect of their work, a paper they'd written, a theory they'd proposed,
patiently working his way around the table.  

"Clarity and insight are found in disagreement," started Taylor.  "When everyone is in agreement, little of import is
actually decided.  You are on the verge of discovery, requiring only an external catalyst," Taylor looked at Hack as he said this, "to break disagreement into agreement.  I am glad to assist you."

"But first," Taylor dropped his eyes to the black backpack, "please show me your artifact." 

Hack unzipped the backpack,
and pulled out a heavy strongbox.  He pushed the backpack further down the table.  He then placed his hand over the white palm outline on top of the box.  Red illuminated fingerprints remained on the cover after Hack removed his hand.  The box clicked.

Hack lifted the lid and Taylor saw the artifact for the first time.

It looked like a piece of a cracked soup bowl.  Taylor looked to Hack for approval before reaching for the artifact. 

"It's ok, we've scanned it carefully over the past year – there's no danger to you, and of course, nothing you could do would harm it," Hack told him.

Taylor picked the artifact up, holding it with both hands.  It appeared to be a white ceramic material, a half-inch thick.  The white was clean and bright, with a subtle blue tint.  Like everyone who picked the artifact up, Taylor was surprised by its weight.  It looked like ceramic or heavy, leaded glass but weighed almost nothing.  

A tiny smile flicked at the edge of Hack's mouth as he watched Taylor's eyebrows knit together briefly. 
Everyone's surprised by how little it weighs
, Hack thought,
as if they'd just witnessed a magic trick
. 

Hack felt a tiny satisfaction to have pricked Taylor's smug armor.  There was something about Taylor that he
just couldn’t like, although he had so far been unable to pinpoint it. 
It's just his arrogance
, Hack thought. 
The guy's got a giant ego.  Been smart his whole life and doesn't want it to go unnoticed. As long as he comes up with something these guys haven't figured out…Nothing else matters.
  Hack smiled at Taylor and nodded.  Taylor met his eyes without an expression and looked down at the artifact.

The others waited
, and watched Taylor turn the artifact over in his hands.  Taylor's fingers traced faint swirling lines in the surface.

"The lines look like indentions in the surface as if they are cut into it, but the surface is smooth.  The traces are below
a glossy, transparent outer surface," Hack provided.  "X-ray and fluoroscope don't tell us anything about the tracings.  The entire thickness of the artifact seems to be one material, but we think there might be sections with different properties." Hack made eye contact with one of the researchers.  "There's a theory that the swirls might be for communication, whether as primary communications or enhancements, we don't know." 

Taylor continued to stare at the artifact.

"What about the sound?" Taylor asked. 

Hack's eyes tightened on Taylor, "Sound?" 

"The music," Taylor looked up at Hack.

Taylor asked, "You hear it?"

"I reviewed the preliminary reports your team published, Major.  Have you discovered a pattern to the music?" 

"Dr. Roberts," Hack asked, looking at the team's radiologist, "would you outline this for Mr. Taylor please?"

Roberts cleared his throat and pulled himself up a little, "We didn't discover the vibrational energy that you're calling 'music' right away, but we isolated the range and monitored it for a three-month period, during which the underlying vibration or background noise didn't seem to repeat, at least in any recognizable way.  It was just a steady stream of different tones, without repeating cycles.  We haven't been able to reliably decode the patterns."

Hack watched Taylor take this in and motioned Roberts to continue, "We observed patterns in the layer above the background vibrational stream that seem to coincide with the artifact'
s proximity to various items.  These foreground vibrations change as objects are brought closer to the artifact.  We experimented with various objects, a glass, metal objects, a wooden block, and things like that.  We put the objects close to the artifact and tracked the changes in the tone patterns.  At first, there seemed to be no logical pattern.  We put an object near the artifact and the pattern would be completely different when we put it back.  The second round of tests, we fabricated a fixture to hold the artifact and the object in exactly the same position relative to each other.  When an object is placed in exactly the same position, it generates a pattern that repeats with about ten percent variance."

"But the pattern is different when the object is out of alignment with the prior position," interrupted Taylor, "even if the same object is introduced".

"Yes," Hack replied before Roberts could answer.

"Cat's whiskers," said Taylor, watching Hack to see if he understood. "A cat's whiskers are called 'vibrissae'.  They allow cats to navigate in complete darkness, winding through grass and branches, while avoiding objects that might damage their eyes.  The foreground vibrations you've detected are transmitting a representation of the surroundings, like a radar image.  The ten percent variance is likely caused by people walking i
n the hallway outside the lab.  It's apparently detecting their movement as well."

This evoked a response from Roberts, "That's just what I was getting at four weeks ago, but Jonas's
ridiculously contrived experiment derailed my theory!"  Jonas took up the argument and the researchers jumped in at once.

The researchers were eager to score points against each other. 
As the debate picked up momentum, Taylor watched them, saying nothing.  Hack knew there would be no clear winner.  None of them would actually admit defeat even if they'd obviously lost, so very little was produced from the exchanges.  Hack kept his eyes on Taylor. 

Taylor's mouth moved slightly as if he were participating in
the conversation, with his eyebrows moving as an occasional point was made, but he didn't interject himself.  He stared at the middle of the table, at the artifact.   Because Taylor sat virtually motionless, Hack noticed a slight movement of Taylor's right arm.  He was doing something under the table.  Hack leaned his head back and to the side to see what.

Turning only his head, Tay
lor met Hack's eyes and smiled.  Something in the smile reminded Hack of Rudolfo's smug self-assurance.  In the few hours he'd spent with Taylor in the preliminary planning sessions, working out contract details, Hack remained uneasy.  The more time he spent with Taylor, the less he liked him.  He was smart.  Hack brought the artifact here because he was smart, but he didn't trust him.  He kept suspicion off his face as Taylor spoke and reminded himself every few seconds that someone as smart as Taylor might be much more perceptive than Rudolfo.

"I'm writing your report, Major" Taylor said.  He raised his right hand up just over the edge of the table.  His right fingers
danced about as if there was a marionette underneath.  As Taylor spoke, there seemed to be no interruption or hesitation of his finger's motion.  

B
lack leather tips covered each of Taylor's right fingers and his thumb.  His palm was covered by a black glove with cut-out fingers.  Taylor twisted his hand to display the back, which had a small chrome plate in the center and smaller knuckle plates.  Blue LED lights tipped each knuckle, and flashed as Taylor's fingers moved.  Seeing this, the researchers paused their debate, intrigued by Taylor's device. 

"I designed this to transcribe my notes during these sessions.  It transmits notes, and immediate instructions to my staff," explained Taylor.  "Please continue, I'm listening."  Taylor put his right hand back under the table.

The discussions continued for an hour longer before the researchers lost steam and noticed Hack and Taylor were just observing.

As soon as the discussion ended,
Taylor stood up.  "Gentlemen, and Major, I hope you will agree that your time and considerable fees have been well spent."  He smiled.  "I will be pleased to meet with you again in the near future, should you require my assistance."

For a moment
, Taylor stood alone, with everyone else staring in disbelief.  They'd expected the session to take all day, possibly several days.

Hack felt hi
s anger rise.  The team was already negative about meeting with an outside consultant, especially one they'd decided had little scientific background.  They'd give him Hell over this.  Hack stood, "We're just getting started here Taylor".  Before he could continue, the conference room door opened.  One of Taylor's staff entered, holding a thick blue bound report. 

Taylor took the report,
and presented it to Hack with a small head bow.  "Major, it has been an especially great pleasure to meet you.  You've brightened my day with this interesting artifact.  Please reserve your judgment though, until you've read the entire report.  It's quite thorough.  There are six additional lines of research and investigation I've proposed to help our military understand the possibilities introduced by the artifact, including the artifact's neutrino mill, which, alone, is a discovery of great potential significance.  Imagine the implications of continuous, ever-replenishing energy, Major.  With suitable design changes, there might never again be a need to store energy.  It could become inexpensively available for all.  The possibilities are fascinating, to say the least." 

Hack was stunned to silence.  He took the report and shook Taylor's extended hand.  As Taylor nodded to the others and turned to leave the room, Hack looked down at the report. 
Then he glanced around the room, seeing a few faces already sporting "I told you so" looks. 

He opened the blue book
, and was overwhelmed by what he saw.  He flipped page after page.  It was a fully-finished product.  There were pages of conclusions, followed by detailed notes and references from other published studies.  The second section, did indeed contain six new proposed tests.  Two of the six were similar to concepts the team had discussed before the session with Taylor, but even these varied in the hypothesis projected.

He typed and compiled this report, while participating, while leading, the discussion.
How is that even possible?  He must have been typing instructions to a team of technical writers and researchers upstairs the whole time he was in here with us.
  Taylor had been highly recommended, so Hack knew he was smart, but this?  He'd have felt the session was an astounding success if Taylor had been able to break even one of the logjam arguments that had held the team unproductive for weeks.  He'd never expected to come away with proposals for new lines of study.  He flipped to the end.  Counting ten pages of single spaced footnotes, there were 204 pages.

The researchers filed past Hack out of the conference
room.  Jonas smirked at him, "That's a classic consultant, Major, they borrow your watch to tell you what time it is, and then they send you an invoice." 

Hack shook his head. 
"No.  It wasn't in the report.  I reviewed all the preliminary data we provided Taylor and removed references to the physical tests that were inconclusive.  The foreground vibration results weren't mentioned in the preliminary report – at all." 

"
Well, you must have made a mistake." Jonas said, shrugging off further discussion, "Otherwise, how could he possibly have detected the vibrations?"  Jonas was shaking his head, "He obviously couldn't actually
hear
the music Major.  The frequencies are far outside the human auditory range.  You've just forgotten mentioning it along the way."

Hack said nothing, letting Jonas lose interest and walk away.  There was no need to argue.  Hack had carefully pulled those findings fro
m the preliminary packet. 
The smug bastard came up with that on his own
, he thought. 
How?

Hack couldn't wait to read the rest of the report.