Desertion
Jim Sullivan awoke at 6:00 AM every morning, just like an alarm clock. But this morning he was awake much earlier because he never really went into a deep sleep. At 5:00 he was up and out the door in short time, and on his way to the office. Yesterday was exciting, but today was the beginning of a new life.
For his whole life, Jim had believed there was alien life out there. It just didn’t make any sense that with hundreds of billions of stars in each galaxy and hundreds of billions of galaxies, there just had to be intelligent life. And now he was sure.
Max was always at work before anyone else and sure enough, there he was sitting at his desk as Jim arrived.
“You’re early this morning”, blurted Max as Jim walked into his office. “I just couldn’t sleep. This is a big story, Max. Bigger than a story; it’s going to change our lives forever Max.”
“Well you better sit down, the clip is gone”.
What?
“Disappeared, deleted, not on my computer anymore.”
Jim immediately checked his phone and sure enough, it was gone. “Give me a minute, I’m sure Phil will have it.”
Jim called Phil and he picked up immediately. Phil was a night person and rarely slept anyway. “Phil, my hologram recording is gone; can you send me another copy?”
“Well, I would, Jim, but mine is gone as well. In fact, about 1:00 AM this morning, I was replaying the recording for the umpteenth time and in a flash, it disappeared. It was nothing I had any control over, it was just gone. I even checked Detective Murphy’s email. It’s gone from there too. I even had copies made on an external hard drive and my personal mini USB drive that wasn’t even attached to my computer. It’s impossible, but all the copies are gone. Not a trace. It’s as though they never existed.”
“Okay Phil, I’ll talk to you later.” “Thank goodness, Max, you opened it last night or you would think I’m hallucinating.”
“I know this is going to sound out of this world, Max, but I really think we’re dealing with alien technology here.”
“Not that again Jim! You and your imagination! Ha!”
“This is different! You saw the hologram and you saw how easily it disappeared. No one on this planet has the technology to do any of what I’ve witnessed the past 24 hours.”
“Okay, it does sound a little strange, I’ll give you that. What do we do with the story? Do we run it as is?”
“No, I promised this John Smith I would wait and I think he just made sure of that. My guess is, he had something to do with this recording being deleted. I need some time. I’ll get back to you when I have more.”