Majesty - Dreams

The sun had gone down, so this light in the sky must be something else, thought the girl. Out of bed

and looking through her telescope was not the approved activity at 3:30 in the morning, but she

knew that neither her mother or father would understand how important it was to view the sky at just

the right time. This time of night meant the atmosphere reflected as little light as possible from

beyond the horizon where the Earth still faced the Sun’s light.

Her telescope was not a powerful model, but her passion for astronomy and space physics was

healthy one for a 10 year old girl, and her parents had just this year given her a new telescope that

could see further and clearer than any she had ever had.

To get the telescope calibrated, she would always start with her easiest astronomical exercise, her

first love in the sky, the moon. The new scope could hone in on the surface and get her looking up

close at craters and surface objects, and the bright new moon in the sky did little in the way of

shadows or other interference. She focused in as close as she could on the crater Tyco, all glorious

85 kilometers of it across, and nearly 5 deep, and then all the way back out to bring the entire moon

into focus and back again.

Doing so, she felt, made it easier to quickly find, focus and refine her view of more distant objects.

Tonight, she hoped to get a much closer view of Mars than ever before. Something stirred in the

house. With a mouse-like peep, she jumped the short distance from window to bed, slipping the

covers over her head and feigning sleep. Deep slow breaths and wide open eyes lay under the

covers, listening for another noise. Moments disguised as forever marched by, timed to the beat of

her pounding heart. With an upwards twitch of one eyebrow, she slowly slid the covers down to

reveal one bright blue eye...

Nothing. No new noise, no grumpy stomp and suddenly opened bedroom door. Seconds later, a

pajama’d foot and ankle slipped down past the beds sheet line, followed by the snake-like form of

the girl as she slid down out of bed and onto the floor, rolling with dramatic, imagined super-heroine

like grace back over to her telescope, eye placed upon the viewfinder as if she’d never left.

But it was way too bright and she gasped, quietly, averting her gaze.

’Maddy, do you want chocolate or vanilla?’, she heard, impossibly. She paused briefly, thinking of a

blurry haze that might have been a memory...

’Maddy!’ said the familiar voice of Sam. ’Do you want me to get regular or chocolate milk’?

Madeline blinked. Again. She stared at the LCD. She laughed. ’Sam, I’m visiting you for one

weekend. Are you sure we need to make milk decisions?’ Sam almost snorted whatever he was

drinking in yet another fit of laughter that was of often and comfortable frequency that Madeline knew

- this was what it meant to have a best friend. His shaggy beard shook as he laughed, and he

squinted across at her via his computer’s camera, peering in close. ’Now Maddy dahling’, he

feigned, putting on fabulous airs, ’there can be none of that, how you say, hakheh pankheh. You

know I’m saving myself.’ ’Mario Lopez is never going to call Sam’, she said, grinning. Sam drew a

pretend offended arm to clutch his chest. ’Will too!’ he said.

He leaned in close to the screen, suddenly serious. ’Did you get the turn by turn directions to the

rental counter Ms. Martin?’ Madeline glanced across to a narrow credenza in the corner, the GPS

map and directions visible on the page resting in the printer tray. She glanced down at her

dayminder, the one possession she could not function without. ’On the printer, ’ she replied, ’I’ve

also got it written down in my minder, along with the flight number, departure time, time in flight,

landing runway, wind speed’’’’ Sam cut her off. ’Alright super nerd, I get it. That’s an impressive

collections of details you’ve got.’ He stuck his tongue out at her and leaned back in his chair. A

DevOps engineer by day, Madeline had met Sam years ago at a MUFON convention and had hit it

off, sharing many of the same beliefs and interests. It wasn’t until about 3 years into their long

distance friendship that Sam had come out to ’Maddy’, as Sam had coined and she had sort of

glommed onto, and she made it clear to him that while she loved him dearly, it had always been like

a sister, and she didn’t need him telling her. He was touched by this, and it had deepened the bond

between them that together they had started their investigatory blog ’Not Alone’.

Madeline pushed herself backwards, her chromed art deco office chair glided smoothly across her

concrete floor towards another desk, resting against the opposite wall under a large heavily

populated bulletin board, crowded with printouts, photos, newspaper clips, hand drawings and oddly,

dozens of drawings of kittens, all wearing costumes from characters featured in Star Trek, Star Wars

or dozens of other popular sci-fi icons.

’Sam, ’ she asked into her headset, looking over the board. ’This could really be THE story, couldn’t

it?’ She snatched a stack of photographs off the desk and kicked herself back to the other desk. For

years they had been working real jobs and spending nearly every waking moment on the blog,

gathering stories, planning trips to sites, conducting interviews - it had always felt like play acting, not

like the ’grown up work’ she did as a Nurse Practitioner, or as her father always teased; ’Doctor

Almost’.

Sam glanced around the room. He gazed back at her over the top of his black horn rimmed glasses.

Sam spent his only serious time, actual day job included, in their blog project together and he’d

proven a brilliant and dedicated partner. Handling the digital operations of their biznaz including

audio/visual, their growing cloud infrastructure, Sam had seen to it that Maddy could pursue and

capture stories from the field that were compelling. Not Alone, short for ’how it’s completely obvious

by now we’re Not Alone’ had begun as Maddy’s college programming project a blog engine tailored

towards investigative journalism. The project was to build a blog engine, and the idea to investigate

UFO’s and Alien visitors was just short of a random selection, a topic needed to drive the

programming project.

But the blog engine was nothing short of fantastic. With a battery of advanced features it could take

images and video collected by Maddy or submitted by a collection of members, and perform analysis

on them to look for patterns and correlations that might hint at alien presence or activity. Over time,

it could actually learn and suggest content, imply correlations. By the time Maddy had finished

college, she already had nearly 2 million regular visitors to her blog, which she always managed to

find the time to carefully curate, separating the journalistic value from the...everything else,

Suddenly, she was in over her head. Almost daily the blog was slowing down or crashing altogether.

Maddy was not sure what to do, she may have written her blog software, but above and beyond that,

her background was medical. Then she met Sam. At 35, Maddy and Sam had been working

together for nearly 10 years, and they finally now felt they may have stumbled upon the evidence

that would prove once and for all - aliens had been and continued to visit Earth, and this was being

kept from the people of Earth for unknown reasons.

Sam chuckled out loud. ’Maddy, should we use ’the protocol’’? Maddy stopped, frozen, her eyes

wide. ’But that would mean...’ she began rotating her head towards the camera, only her eye

remained fixed ahead. Sam began laughing. ’I’d have to press...’ she continued to rotate her head

towards the camera, painfully slowly. ’This button.’ she finished, facing the camera with a robotic

stare to a now in hysterics laughing Sam.

She broke from her act. ’I dunno’, she said, ’first time for everything I guess?’ The protocol was

something they had come up with one night while working online together, and it was one of those

things that seemed more serious and fascinating to them as they had both had ample wine and

other indulgences. Essentially it was the most paranoid strategy for securing digital data two brilliant

people, intermittently distracted by a desire to snack, could contrive. They had never thought to test

it, but in a nutshell, if they stored files in it, they could hide it on the internet, and program it to send

itself to multiple press and government websites if something should happen to them. Meanwhile, it

was encrypted a dozen ways to Sunday, and without a 128-bit decryption key only known to the two

of them, the data stored on their usb drive would take years to crack.

Sam gave the appearance of thinking it over but Maddy knew better. Before he had a chance to

respond she replied, ’I think you’re right Sam, let’s do it. Sam practically beamed. ’Okay, download

the contents of..’, he paused, ’..this file to your USB stick, everything is in it. Then run this next

script, but take the usb out first. The script will hunt down all the data on your local machine and

wipe it. Two files appeared in the chat and Maddy dragged them both to her documents folder.

Tucking her USB drive into the computer’s port she dropped to a command line on the computer.

>;mv ~/Documents/samfiles/* /extUsb/

’Got the files Sam, ’ she said. ’Anything else?’ ’I have a plane to catch!’. Sam grinned. ’It will be

great to finally meet you in person. Nope, that’s it. Run the wipe script and I’ll talk to you when you

get to LAX.’ Maddy executed the command. ’This is going to be really big Sam, I’m so glad I met

you.’

’Me too Maddy.’ said Sam. It was the last time Maddy would ever hear Sam’s voice.