The Four Corners Hole – Intelligence (984 hits)
Category: NoneLabels: FCH
Rating: 2 on 19 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by Jack McCallum (View user info) at 2006-04-27 18:25:30 EDT
Intro http://www.ubersite.com/m/74452
Pfc. Weyms http://www.ubersite.com/m/75620
theholetruth.com http://www.ubersite.com/m/75708
Emergence - http://www.ubersite.com/m/76672
Women's World (I) http://www.ubersite.com/m/77102
Divulgence - http://www.ubersite.com/m/78495
Women's World (II) http://www.ubersite.com/m/81641
Women's World (III) Conveyance http://www.ubersite.com/m/87157
The Four Corners Hole - Intelligence
Morning, and Captain Kaines was exhausted.
He had been up all night, wandering from station to station under the night-dark windows in Central. Central was a great circular room where every bit of data on the Four Corners Hole was collected, synthesized, categorized, stored, and debated.
Most of the top brass thought that facts were facts and they should be handled as such, leaving no room for speculation or debate.
Kaines was essentially a data herder. He had been put in charge of trying to discover the how and why of the hole and toward that end he encouraged debate among the many scientific teams assembled here. He wanted long-haired loner geologists from the University of Denver to get into screaming matches with flat-topped Army Engineers. He wanted civilian and military historians to haggle over the meanings and possible origins of things that had been collected from the shelves in the hole, circular ledges which descended down into darkness.
The Four Corners Hole seemed to exist in the present, and many eras in the past. Kaines was not alone in wondering if it existed in the future, or in different futures.
Ignoring the possibility of some practical joker or jokers having access to the hole and the ability to fool specialists in nearly two hundred fields of study, it seemed that the hole not only existed in the past, contrary what was known about the four corners area before the appearance of the hole, but the hole may also have existed in different pasts.
Against one wall was a secured shelving unit which had been dubbed the trophy case. In the case were things that simply did not make sense, things that did not fit into the past Kaines knew. He wanted those artifacts on display. He wanted those things right in the faces of the security-cleared specialists working in Central.
He wanted debate. He wanted to know every possible reason for the existence of the hole.
Kaines freely admitted he did not know much, but he was certain that the hole was no mere geological anomaly.
There was a purpose at work here.
The items in the trophy case were small.
There was a gray and white twenty dollar bill, worn and ragged as if it had been passed through a thousand hands. On the face was a picture of Reinhard Heydrich, who before his assassination had been considered a possible successor to Adolf Hitler. On the back of the bill was an engraving featuring the Nazi and American eagles side by side. The E series bill had been issued in 1965 from the Federal Reserve in Richmond.
There was a discarded coffee cup. The cup was cracked and the handle had been broken off, but the faded illustration on the cup showed a photo of two men in space suits waving to the camera. Surrounding the photo were maps and drawings of what appeared to be a settlement on the moon, and Cyrillic text. The text read '1954~1979 - Celebrating 25 Years Serving Tycho City - Uremovich Water and Gases.'
There was a mummified hand with three fingers and an opposable thumb that was five inches long. It was the hand of a highly evolved reptile. The hand had been holding a small oval of green glass that vibrated when held a certain way. Kaines had held that ball of glass after being told it was safe to do so, and the vibrations had traveled up his arm and shoulder and neck and into the bones of his ear, where he heard a squall of noise that varied in pitch and volume. The noises put Kaines in mind of a dozen rusty hinges being opened and closed. The team studying the ball, including physicists and a group of designers and engineers from Sony and Apple, concluded that the sounds were most likely music, but they hadn't ruled out a talking book. The rest of the body was still down in the hole, being carefully removed from a tomb of solid rock.
There was a front page from the Chicago Tribune dated April 12, 1923. It showed stacks of bloody skeletons in flatbed trucks parked in a long line outside Mercy Hospital on South Michigan Avenue. The headline was bleak. 'Skinner Bug Claims 30 Million American Lives - No End in Sight.' There was water damage to the paper and some of the old print was illegible, but there were references to what was also called the Taipei Flu and the China Sickness sweeping the globe. The virus appeared to act like an accelerated flesh-eating bacteria, stripping living flesh and muscle from infected bodies and skinning them to the bone.
When that last item had been raised up from the hole Kaines had called an immediate halt to any further excavations on that shelf. If the newspaper referred to an actual event in an alternate past, and part of that past was now in this world, Kaines didn't want to be responsible for accidentally unearthing and unleashing the virus.
The trophy case was just the tip of the iceberg. There were now three climate-controlled warehouses filled with artifacts from the ledges in the hole and a fourth storage area was being constructed, all of them holding items as small as a pin (upon the head of which the entire Old Testament had apparently been etched by hand) and a thirty-six foot long jawbone (which a team of zoologists stated most closely resembled that of a modern elephant shrew).
The plume of volcanic gases rushing out of the Four Corners hole had stopped just after midnight. Since then Kaines had been in Central. He had sent Tom Begay and the young Navajo to a safe area after the other Indian who had come out of the hole with the youngster had... had what? Spontaneously combusted?
Now Kaines was sipping tepid coffee, listening to a report from his earth sciences team, and wondering if the possible end of life on Earth was coming down the pike. At the very least, if what they feared came to pass, it would mean the end of the United States of America.
*
Ant was in yet another box. Instead of being patient and waiting for release from the box, Ant was anxious. He was scared, and struggling to be brave, trying to hold out long enough to do the bidding of Mah-ih.
"I have to go into the hole in the ground," he said, in rapid-fire Navajo. "You have told me there are still Navajo walking the earth. I have to save them from what is coming."
Tom-be-gai held up his hands and said, "Wo-wo-slo-doun-k'id."
Ant shook his head and paced from window to door and back again.
Even though Sergeant Begay had seen the man the kid had called Hok'ee burn down to spattering gobbets of fat and bones that snapped and popped like Rice Crispies he was still having a hard time believing that any of what was happening was being caused by a God. To him Mah-ih was just a trickster from childhood tales, a troublemaking character of myth, like Loki or Br'er Rabbit.
When he had first heard the name Mah-ih he had been frightened, but that had been hours ago, and now he shrugged off his fear as a momentary hysteria, the ghost of childhood tales told by his grandfather.
He was telling the kid the same damn thing, speaking fluently in the Navajo he had learned from his parents (even though the kid would squint and shake his head and throw him questioning looks as if Begay were a mumbling idiot) and he was sure he could get through to the kid eventually, when there was a knock on the door.
An MP leaned into the room and said, "Sergeant, Cap'n Kaines says there is something you have to hear, and I'm to escort the young Navajo to Central as well."
*
When Begay and Ant reached Central they found Kaines surrounded by four geologists and two men borrowed from the NOAA. The scientists were almost cringing. They looked like dogs awaiting either praise or punishment and unsure of which was to come.
"Listen to this Tommy, and I want you to translate for Wolcha... Wollacho—"
"Wol-a-chee," Begay said. "It means 'ant.'"
"Got it," Kaines said. "Translate for Ant. You okay, kid?"
Ant saw Kayn-zh look from Tom-be-gai to him, and he did his best to mimic the stern face of this tribe's chief. He gave the man a nod and said, "Oh-khai," which he had come to understand was a declaration that one's spirit was well.
"All right," Kaines said. "Here's what's happening. That plume of gas and ash that was coming out of the hole last night was volcanic in nature. The gases were—"
Kaines turned to a civvy in a plaid shirt.
"Malcolmson, Denver U," the man said to Begay. "The gases vented from the hole were primarily carbon dioxide, water and sulfur dioxide, as well as considerable amounts of hydrogen, carbon monoxide, helium, hydrogen sulfide, and hydrogen chloride."
"All of which makes a damned toxic cocktail," Kaines said. "Now here is where things get weird."
The Captain paused, glanced out the window at the hole, illuminated by the floodlights as well as the first light of the rising sun, and corrected himself.
"Make that weird-er. The venting stopped at about seven minutes after midnight."
Kaines returned his attention to Begay and the boy.
"At fifteen minutes into the new day a Park Ranger in Yellowstone reported an increase in the venting of gases. Now there is always venting in the park, hell, that's one of the big tourist attractions, the geysers, but this is on a much greater scale."
Kaines pointed to another man, who adjusted his glasses and said, "We are able to take very accurate readings of the gases that vent from a volcano or caldera, counting each gas in parts per million." He fidgeted with an ID card at the end of a chain around his neck. The card identified him as a member of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.
"When we heard what was happening at Yellowstone we pulled that data up on one of our screens. We still had the data on the hole on some screens. It wasn't long before we noticed the mix of gases was identical down to parts per million."
The left corner of the man's mouth twitched. "That's impossible. These gases are like fingerprints. Most volcanic emissions are very similar to one another, but the odds of two spectrographic analyses matching exactly are... astronomical."
A florid, round-faced man touched his nose and said, "And we have a group from the USGS out there now. They are reporting swarms of miniquakes, and they have recorded a rise in the caldera." For a moment he looked confused, disbelieving, and almost tearful. "Fifty-six centimeters," he said.
Begay gave Kaines a 'what the fuck' shrug, even as he translated for Ant, who was hanging on every word.
The round-faced man said, "Since 1923 the Yellowstone Caldera has risen 74 centimeters. It has been raised more than half that amount in the last six hours or so."
Kaines ran a hand through his short-cropped hair and spoke up.
"Here's how these guys put it in plain English earlier, Tommy. When a normal volcano blows, it shoots its wad and then things cool down, and a natural cap or plug of stone forms in the vent tube. With a caldera... basically most of Yellowstone National Park is a caldera. It's a stone bowl that is actually a plug over the old vent of a supervolcano. The plug is big, and heavy. It takes a lot of pressure and heat to make it blow, and as things start heating up below a hell of a lot of rock is liquefied, and that releases trapped gases that expand under tremendous pressure, causing venting and earthquakes before the whole thing finally explodes. The thinking is that if the Yellowstone caldera ever blew, it would cause incredible devastation. And what we are seeing now are signs that an eruption is imminent... an explosion the likes of which has never been experienced by modern man."
Glasses from the NOAA said, "Magma could be ejected thirty miles straight up. More than five hundred miles in every direction the impact would be almost instantaneous, with all life being extinguished by falling ash, magma flows, and the utter brutality of the explosion. Think of Mount St. Helens times twenty-five hundred. Thousands of cubic miles of ash would fill the sky, and in time, circle the globe."
"Nuclear winter," Kaines said. "The end of... well, America, anyway. Maybe the world."
Ant looked out the window at the hole.
"Mah-ih," he said. He held out a hand, palm up, and mimicked a walking man with two fingers. "Wol-a-chee," he said. The finger legs walked to the edge of his palm and stepped off the edge. The young man held up both hands, and with fingers and thumbs created a large circle. A hole.
"Jesus Christ," Begay said.
Kaines laughed and said, "You might want to rethink that, Tommy. I'm beginning to think your people were right and ours were wrong. Maybe you should be praying to Mah-ih."
"That would be like praying to the bastard offspring of God and Satan," Begay said dismissively.
"We may not have a choice," Kaines said, walking to one window and looking out at the sunrise. "The jet stream is blowing stuff from Yellowstone down to us right now. This is really happening."
Begaye and Ant joined Kaines at the window, looking out at the spectacular display of colors.
"Maybe our mystery guest is the key," Kaines said, studying the young Navajo. "Maybe Mah-ih really is getting ready to save the world by somehow venting all of the destructive power under Yellowstone through this hole, or maybe he'll allow that pressure to build until it blows, and let the world be destroyed."
User Reviews
Submitted by jack11058 (user info) at 2006-05-04 14:31:56 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by nrduncan (user info) at 2006-05-01 12:36:11 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by myexstaintstain (user info) at 2006-04-30 21:49:42 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by JonnyX (user info) at 2006-04-28 17:02:34 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
I was expecting the San Francisco Ant to come bounding along...
Submitted by Jack_McCallum (user info) at 2006-04-28 12:25:47 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
Benny, let's just say a 'convergence' is coming.
I had originally thought to use FCH as another Pandemic style free-for-all on Uber, then changed my mind when a few other story possibilities came to mind. There could be endless FCH stories, though. The fuckin thing exists is every time, and parallel worlds.
I plan on wrapping the whole thing up soon.
Of course with me that could be six years from now. We'll see.
-
Stagger, I'll print them out and read 'em on the weekend. Looks like good shithouse rading, and trust me, that is high praise in my world.
Btw, this was fucking hilarious...
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Submitted by trent_nz (user info) at 2006-03-07 20:37:42 (#)
Ranking: -2
dick fuck
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Submitted by Stagger_Lee (user info) at 2006-03-07 20:43:18 (#)
Ranking: 0
Submitted by trent_nz (user info) at 2006-03-07 20:37:42 (#)
Ranking: -2
dick fuck
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Cogent, constructive, (retaliatory) criticism. Thank you.
Submitted by Brdn_Nkd (user info) at 2006-04-28 09:33:02 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by Benny (user info) at 2006-04-28 06:12:55 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
I liked this a lot, the four corners hole is quite interesting and can be very diverse in the possible story lines available.
Are you going to write more about the Women's world soon?
Submitted by Berty (user info) at 2006-04-28 05:31:36 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Pretty old school.
Submitted by DCWoody (user info) at 2006-04-28 05:23:15 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Or, more like it is very variable, some episodes amazing, some can't hold my attention.
Submitted by DCWoody (user info) at 2006-04-28 04:57:31 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
This series improves.
Submitted by Stagger_Lee (user info) at 2006-04-28 04:49:28 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Jack, if you have half an hour or so at some point, I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts on this series:
http://www.ubersite.com/u/Stagger_Lee/l/monster
Cheers.
Submitted by Stagger_Lee (user info) at 2006-04-28 04:02:26 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Stories like this brought me to post here, and keep bringing me back.
Righteous.
Submitted by Phinch (user info) at 2006-04-28 02:07:09 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
more
Submitted by rockdocc (user info) at 2006-04-27 21:08:18 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
you need more reviews....
so I review it AGAIN!!
Submitted by Crystle (user info) at 2006-04-27 20:28:32 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Submitted by rockdocc (user info) at 2006-04-27 18:49:33 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
this feels like you took a lot of time doing research for this story. It reads incredibly well, and I am hooked on every word.
great job.
Submitted by Yes (user info) at 2006-04-27 18:49:26 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
woah
Submitted by Foolproof (user info) at 2006-04-27 18:41:48 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Nice
Submitted by c1ndy (user info) at 2006-04-27 18:31:10 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
I'm glad this is still going.