Bad Glass

“Charlie’s program,” Taylor explained. “We load up all of our email, Danny plugs it into the military network, and it launches a burst of encrypted data out into the real world.” She smiled at the phrase. “Charlie’s got a server on the outside—decrypts all of that information and forwards it on. It also downloads all of our incoming mail, along with the latest news from a bunch of sites.” She held up the tiny drive. “It’s all in here, ready for us to start surfing at our leisure. We do it every couple of days. We’ll get you hooked up next time around.”

“And the military doesn’t know? Isn’t that dangerous?”

“Nah,” Danny said, dismissing the concern with a wave of his hand. “Charlie’s got it streamlined down to a couple of hundred packets. As long as we aren’t sending out high-definition video, it’s barely noticeable. Besides, I know guys who surf hard-core porn from their military terminals. Next to some of the nasty shit I’ve seen on their screens, this is tulips and butterflies.”

“He also recharges for us.” Taylor pointed to a power strip beneath the soldier’s desk. “I’m sure he’d do your camera for you.”

I nodded. The thought of throwing my battery charger up through a third-story window didn’t exactly fill me with joy—when I was a kid, I never played Little League, and my throwing arm was for shit—but it was nice to know I had the option.

“And now that we’ve got business out of the way …” Taylor took a step back, leaving me hanging over Danny’s shoulder, transforming the two of us into unintentional conspirators. “Why don’t you tell Dean about what you’re doing here? Catch us up on all of that great government progress.”

Danny gave Taylor a scowl, then turned back to his computer. He popped open a window and started scouring through directories, looking for something. “What do you know, Dean? About the phenomenon?”

“I’ve been following it on some underground message boards, and there’s been some stuff that hasn’t made it into the mainstream press. Some strange pictures. Some video. Vague, translucent figures, weird physics. Kids in a cell-phone video, bouncing a ball through a—” I paused, trying to think how best to describe it. “—a sticky space in the air, where the ball just slows down, then speeds up again, finally stopping and hovering in midair. Everybody knows something’s going on here—there’s no denying the quarantine or the government’s refusal to talk—but nobody knows exactly what. Some type of terrorist attack, maybe. A chemical leak. A haunting.” I smiled at this last suggestion. “Maybe something to do with an ancient Indian burial ground?”

Danny didn’t smile. “Yeah, we’ve got a lot of scientists trying to figure it all out. Here, on this floor, we’re just gathering information. We catalog incident reports—from civilians, from our soldiers on patrol—and look for patterns.” He lifted a clipboard from the clutter on his desk. It held a photocopied sheet titled REPORT OF UNEXPLAINED INCIDENT. This particular sheet had been filled out in red ink.

Before he set it back down, I managed to read a few of the neatly typed questions:

    13) What were your thoughts before, during, and after the incident? (Please be as specific as possible.)

    14) What emotions did the incident evoke? (Fear? Amusement? Regret?)

    15) Do you feel compelled to seek out similar experiences?

The person who had filled out this particular form had drawn a shaky red line through question 15, as if he or she were trying to strike it from existence—the question or the compulsion it described, I didn’t know.

“And what have you found?” I asked.

“A lot of stuff.” Danny shrugged. “And nothing.” He pointed to a white dry-erase board tacked to the opposite wall. There was a list of six bullet-pointed items sketched out in bold black letters. “We’ve narrowed the phenomena down to six basic categories. First, you’ve got your visitors—people and things appearing where they shouldn’t be, where they can’t be. Celebrities driving through town in BMWs. Dead politicians. We’ve even got a cluster of random people who swear they saw the Empire State Building rising out of the west end of Riverfront Park, but I’m guessing that one’s just complete bullshit. On the flip side of that, you’ve got our second item: disappearances. People and things that should be here but aren’t. Things that just … cease to exist. There’s a whole block in the industrial district out east—it used to be warehouses, with streets and trucks and loading docks. It’s all gone now. Nothing but flat, bare earth. And you know the mayor, right? You’ve seen the video?”

“The mayor? That was real?” I didn’t bother trying to mask my surprise. “That video made the rounds, but everyone dismissed it as a fake. I’ve seen page after page of analysis. There are splices! And they found the actress, the woman who goes on stage after the mayor disappears. She says she did it for her friend’s video project.”

“Nah,” Danny said, his face lighting up with a bright smile. “All of that stuff came from us. Misinformation. Brilliant, really! We couldn’t stop the video from getting out there—it was broadcast live, after all, on national television—so we flooded the Internet with fake copies. We added splices and artifacts. We even dubbed over some of the crowd noise, to make it sound like bad acting.”

Danny opened a new window on his computer screen and launched a video clip. It was the same press conference I’d seen a dozen times before, but in amazingly clean, high-definition video—better than broadcast quality, better than anything I’d ever seen. And there was no distortion, no artifacts, no obvious splicing. It showed the mayor answering questions, getting angry, then disappearing.

In front of cameras. In front of a whole crowd of reporters.

“We put an emergency injunction on everyone in the room, requiring them to stay quiet. The woman who comes on stage—” Danny pointed to the sharply dressed woman as she stepped up to the lectern; he stayed silent as she looked around and shook her head. “She was his press secretary. She’s in New York now. We hired an actress to come forward and claim credit for her role.”

Danny shut down the video and swiveled back around. “Truth is, the mayor’s gone. He disappeared—right that day, right that millisecond—and he hasn’t been seen since. And the video gives us nothing. Just—one frame he’s there, with that pissed-off look on his face, and the next frame … poof!” He popped open his hand, showing me an empty palm.

I stood dumbstruck for a moment, trying to process this information.

“Yeah,” Danny said. “Just blows your fucking mind.”

I glanced over at Taylor, thinking she’d break down laughing at any moment, revealing this whole thing as a big fat joke, but her face remained perfectly still.

“Anyway, after visitors and disappearances, we’ve got sounds without sources.” Danny pointed back to the whiteboard. “Voices emanating from empty rooms. Displaced screams and crying. Hell, for two days an invisible gun battle raged outside the convention center; a lot of people heard that one.” Danny shivered, and his voice dropped. “You could call them auditory ghosts, I guess. They usually come at night. We’ve got people who can’t sleep for all of the things they hear.”

I remembered the soldier at the barricade. I remembered the wistful, nervous look on his face. He’d seemed like a haunted man, talking about his transfer out of the city, about how he no longer heard things.

“Next, we’ve got creatures. Either animals completely out of place—flamingos in the park, clouds of butterflies in the middle of the night—or things that don’t exist, things that shouldn’t exist.” I nodded, remembering the dogs—the wolves—from the night before. Amanda’s animals, with those strange, extrajointed limbs. “There’s some scary shit out there,” he said. “We’ve found bodies. Bodies with tooth marks or clawed nearly in half.” Danny shivered again; I wasn’t sure if this was a genuine reaction, or just something he did to provide emphasis.

“Our fifth category is a little more difficult.” I glanced up at the board and saw the phrase “mental problems.” “We’re not quite sure if it’s a phenomenon in its own right or a result of everything else. It’s just … people going crazy. Acting odd, unusual. Losing memories. Going schizophrenic or catatonic. It might be a result of all this stress, or it might be something else. Another symptom of this … disease.” Danny shook his head and managed a sad little smile. “In my time here I’ve had two commanding officers fall apart. One was struck dumb by complete amnesia. The other attacked three of his men with a knife … before turning it on his own genitalia.”

I made an involuntary wince.

“And the final category?” I asked.

Danny gestured back toward the whiteboard. “Miscellaneous,” he said, offering up a pathetic shrug. “The last of our all-encompassing groups. Just … everything else.”