Locus

Gerald Briggs slapped his alarm clock. It wasn’t the most pleasant way to wake up in the morning, but he was a heavy sleeper.  Slowly, he began his morning routine. It was the same every morning, and had been for so long that appliances in his house had developed small finger-shaped indents.  It might even be possible to tell that he owned them by taking his fingerprints off the buttons.

He was a 35 year old theoretical physicist with some truly remarkable ideas.  Other than that he was an unremarkable person. No, “unremarkable” was not quite the right word; he was more unremarked-on.  So unremarked-on, in fact, that once he had almost gotten a parking ticket simply because the cop hadn’t seen him inside the car.  People he worked with on anything less than a weekly basis practically had to be reintroduced every time they met.  It was as if people just let him slide into the backs of their heads, taking up silent residence like that mysterious item nobody seems to have bought, lurking in the depths of the attic.

Gerald wasn’t anything close to a household name inside of his lifetime; he was barely known inside of the apartment complex he lived in.  In fact, two times his landlord had forgotten to charge him rent, but he had paid anyway.  Eventually, Gerald would go on to be credited for the invention of practical antimatter and graphene neural networks that could replace dead brain cells, but he only got recognition for these things after his death.

While he eventually did become a household name, there was only ever one picture ever taken of him.  He had somehow missed being referenced anywhere but in type for his entire life.

Right now, he was going through his daily mail.  Or someone’s daily mail anyway.  One envelope was a bill with his name misspelled.  There were three credit card offers to “Customer Name Here” and one advertisement addressed to “Current Resident” that had the wrong address on it.  It was all the kind of mail that has the pungent smell of unwelcome bureaucracy on it.

He was sorting through what to throw away when he heard something almost entirely out of place from his normal every day routine.

He heard a knock at the door, which wasn’t completely alien—possibly the only person who knew him by sight was an old lady that regularly got her son’s address wrong.  But this knock was more businesslike than hers.

Cautiously, Gerald peered through the peephole and saw several men in business attire.  Upon opening the door slowly, a menacing badge was immediately placed in the general area of his face.

“We are the C.I.A.  And you are coming with us.”  The voice was authoritative and didn’t intend to take any lip.  The badge vanished back into the equally menacing sports jacket.

Gerald must have been in a state of shock because he spoke up, from somewhere that couldn’t have been his rigorously sensible nature.

“Can I get dressed first?” This seemed to throw the agent, who lost a good bit of his authoritative bluster.

“Uhh yes, yes.  Definitely do that first.”

Gerald closed the door as politely as possible in the somewhat embarrassed agent’s face and went to start getting dressed.  This was all an incredibly unusual chain of events for him, and it took a bit for the shock to set in of somebody knowing his name and intentionally coming to his door.  It took so long, in fact, that by the time he finally managed to fully register his bewilderment, he was already getting into a black SUV.

The inside of the SUV was black and cramped; he found himself sitting in between two “agents” —as Gerald had decided to call them, not knowing who they really were, or what their intentions were for him.  They were both darkly dressed and, judging by the annoying metallic lump that kept poking him, at least one of them was armed.  The agent in the front seat turned around as if to say something to Gerald, but instead he faced the driver and asked.

“Couldn’t you have gotten a car with more room in it?”  He went on before the driver could possibly answer. “I mean, come on.  This is our first job in the field here.  It looks unprofessional.”

“I’m sorry, but you said we needed to get this done ASAP.” The driver pronounced it as a singular word. “So I just grabbed the first car I could find.” The agent in the front seat sighed and turned back to Gerald.

“OK.  Mr. Briggs.  I know we aren’t quite being professional here, but yes we’re the C.I.A.  We apologize for any inconvenience. However, currently we are experiencing a…” He paused a moment, as if searching for a word.

“National emergency?” Gerald asked.

“Nah, it’s probably worse than that.  It’s more of a ‘Global Crisis.’” He paused, as if tasting the words to see if they fit. “Yeah.  That’s about right.  I can’t tell you much here, but if we can’t stop it, it could be even farther reaching than a ‘Global Crisis.’”

The words dropped into a pit of silence.  The rest of the trip was uncomfortable, but uneventful.  They arrived at the airport and had some trouble with security until the menacing badges were shown, checked.  Despite the agents’ apparent newness to working in the field, they seemed to intimidate the average person nonetheless; Gerald could feel people’s eyes on him and his armed escorts.  They boarded a private jet, where he was informed politely but firmly, and also at gunpoint, that he was not to talk to anybody on the plane.

The food on the plane wasn’t bad, certainly better than most airline food, and he wasn’t charged for anything.  When he and the other five civilians on the plane finally landed, they were picked up by a bus and taken to a scattering of temporary structures surrounding an otherwise uninteresting-looking suburban house.  As they were led in through the flap of a tent, Gerald saw a mishmash of scientific equipment and several folding chairs in a half-circle around a projector screen.

There were two other non-military personnel there.  Both of them looked about as much in the dark as Gerald was.  Just then, the agent who had been in the front seat of the car walked into the tent and strode purposefully up to the screen, as if to present a lecture to them.

“I suppose you’re wondering why we brought you all here,” he began. “Well, here to explain that is noted theoretical physicist Dr. Gordon Free-“  He paused mid-sentence, looking at the door.  Somebody in uniform came up to him and the two had a short conversation, the only part of which that Gerald could hear was “What do you mean, he lost his voice?!”

Turning back to the audience, the agent looked more than slightly put upon and continued hesitantly.

“OK. Due to unforeseen circumstances, I will be the one telling you why we are here.”

The uniformed messenger sat down at the computer and began pulling up things on the projector.  As he was doing that, a mildly dressed man with a goatee—and the most stereotypical nerd glasses Gerald thought he would ever see—came in and sat down next to him.  His name-tag read “Dr. Freeman.”

Just then the agent up front finished being ad hoc technical support and began to speak.

“My name is Rodger Walton, and we brought you here because of THIS!” He turned and gestured dramatically at the projector screen behind him.  After seeing what was on the screen, though, his shoulders slumped a little. “Jenkins, we don’t have to start at the beginning every time, do we? Can you just skip to the part?”

Before the uniformed man (presumably named Jenkins) started skipping through the video, Gerald caught “Once upon a time in the magical la-“ before the screen started skipping through scenes with… pastel animated ponies in them?  Gerald was beginning to wonder when the camera crew would jump out and yell “GOTCHA!” or “APRIL FOOL!”

Finally Jenkins seemed to get to the right part, and the screen froze about ¾ of the way through the video.  Gerald noticed one of the “ponies” in the background had a slightly wall-eyed look, as if it had walked directly into a wall in the recent past.

“OK, there, now zoom in on the upper left corner,” Rodger said, before somewhat dramatically turning to the audience—“and THAT is why we brought you gentlemen here today.”

On the screen, on the left hand side, was a blurry and pixelated, but still recognizable, human hand.