1
if writing2010 == true {execute;}
else {chkverif lt87; chkverif ero2021}
if lt87 == true {execute lt87;}
if ero2021 == true {execute ero2021;}
Cherko slid to a stop in the garage, alongside Erica’s 2001 Honda.
He wasn’t... right.
Something was terrible wrong with him, he felt it, and it made him sick to his stomach.
What had just happened?
Cherko hit the garage door switch as he entered the house.
“Erica! Erica!”
No answer. But he saw the message light blinking on the answering machine.
The thought did people still use these things? entered his mind, but he dismissed it.
Cherko rushed past the message machine, up a short flight of stairs, then hooked a sharp right to enter the third floor of the tri-level... and ran smack into a wall.
Cherko pushed away from his desk.
What the hell?
He leaned over, peering into the laptop’s display, to words he had just written.
Did people still use these things?
Ran smack into a wall...
He frowned. Got to his feet. Sat back down.
Where was he?
The computer was directly in front of him on his desk. And those words... words that were his own, his own creation—
Were they?
Cherko brought his hands to the keyboard.
Laptop? Wait a minute, where was—
Cherko suddenly felt sick, very sick. Something just wasn’t right. Breathing fast and shallow, shallow and fast, he...
Looked around his office. What the hell was the matter? He was alone, he was—
But he wasn’t. He wasn’t even at home.
He looked to the screen.
Laptop? Wait a minute, where was—
Cherko suddenly felt sick, very sick. Something just wasn’t right. Breathing fast and shallow, shallow and fast, he...
Looked around his office. What the hell was the matter? He was alone, he was—
But he wasn’t. He wasn’t even at home.
Cherko again pushed away from his
(desk?)
shooting to his feet. He spun around, lightheaded. Braced himself against the wall with his hands up before him; his face inches from—
Cherko spun back around to his desk.
Have to slow down my breathing!
He looked into the screen.
Cherko again pushed away from his
(desk?)
shooting to his feet. He spun around, lightheaded. Braced himself against the wall with his hands up before him; his face inches from—
“Oh, no... no, no, no... this can’t be happening...”
Trembling and sweating, he looked up.
He was no longer at home, but in... what?... a vault? A classified computer lab like at work?
“Something’s wrong... something’s very wrong, here,” Cherko closed his eyes.
Focus. Have to focus.
Cherko sat back down, gripped the elbow rests of his chair. His stomach was much worse, his vision swam crazily before him. He wiped clammy sweat from his brow, his cheeks.
He was doused in the stuff.
His chest felt like something powerful had reached around it and was squeezing the life out of him.
Cherko opened his eyes to find his hands flying across a bulky keyboard. He had no control over what his hands were doing, but the words, they just kept coming....
Cherko leaned closer into the screen. The words, they were so familiar, so right. They seemed so much a part of him. Who he was. Each character, so perfectly kerned, fonted, and arranged.
Alive.
Felt words coursing through his veins... words animated and exploding with an energetic importance that felt like the very breath of life....
Cherko closed his eyes and let the words come.
The words coursed through him, filled his being with vitality... became his heart, his core, his spirit. Without these words... he was nothing. A shell. A blank screen. A—
Cherko opened his eyes.
Screamed.
Before him was a face, a face in a soundproofed and electronically isolated vault within a vault. A face not his own. A face that bore directly into his soul and knew every inch of who and what he was.
There were no secrets.
Yes, he was a shell. A blank screen. A schema. He was...
A program in the process of being coded.
100-Mile Low Earth Orbit
4 November 2021
0915 Hours Zulu
“I am not a piece of code!” Cherko cried, struggling, sweating, and hyperventilating within his confinement that now entirely encapsulated him from head to toe in one solid piece of pseudo-metal-composite material he was still unable to identify. Hundreds of pulsating, multicolored, fiber optic-like leads ran from his head behind him into a panel somewhere.
“This is insane! There’s no way! I’m a man, not some mindless hacker-inspired program!” James Cherko shouted to Eurphraeus.
No longer was he in an orbiting space station, spy or otherwise, but now more of a metal coffin. An electronic coffin. A tiny compartment that rapidly closed in on him...
“It is what it is,” Eurphraeus said.
“It makes no sense! First you show me dying in a spaceship crash in 1947, then you show me as nothing more than ones and zeros? “Am I dead? Is this all in my frigging head?”
“You are not dead. You exist.”
“But... the memories—the manuscript! Here.”
“Look around you. What do you see,” Eurphraeus asked.
Cherko, eyes fearful and wide, took in the command module—or what there was of it. It was a shrinking box.
Was continuing to shrink.
It was barely ten-by-ten, and shrinking by the moment without the faintest whisper of sound.
Cherko’s head hurt. He looked to Eurphraeus. “No... no-no-no!”
Eurphraeus was no longer.
“Eurphraeus!”
The module contracted. Shortened. With each twitch of an eye the module continually—maddeningly—reduced in size. Cherko thrashed about.
It shrunk still more.
Cherko could no longer breathe. Maddeningly hyperventilated.
The walls of the station collapsed in on him until all he could see was...
Circuitry.
Software.
Electrons.
Cherko was no longer constrained within the strange metal constriction that had crisscrossed, then entirely enveloped, his body.
He free-floated in space...
In orbit above a fragile, eggshell-blue planet.
He changed his perspective with a thought and looked out in the opposite direction, toward that of deepest black space.
Stars.
Panicking, he reached out for something to grab onto—
But was in freefall.
A controlled, on-orbit freefall, where his stomach tried to launch up and out his mouth... except he had no stomach—no mouth.
And, of course, there was nothing upon which to grab hold.
Eurphraeus!, Cherko called out into the cold, starry blackness, What’s happened? WHAT’S HAPPENING TO ME!
Cherko 360’d, but it was all the same.
Alone. Totally alone.
Except for the cerulean planet turning beneath him.
He had no arms nor legs with which to “flail.” No support structures, no space station, no body, because...
He was the orbiting platform.
I don’t understand! Cherko again cried, I don’t want to die!
James, life is not dependent upon corporeal expression. Never has been, Eurphraeus sent. Your world, your existence, however, has focused upon that.
My body—what happened to my body—where is it?
It no longer matters.
It does to me!
Search your memories—
I’m tired of memories! Tired of searching! I want my body back—my life!
You have a personality... you have Thought. Consciousness. From where did those originate? Where did they go upon the loss of your own physical platform? They remain with you, do they not?
Cherko... computed.
How did I get here! What... what’s happening to me!
Before Cherko finished the thought/calculation, he remembered what had happened. It finally made sense. All of it.
Cherko saw his death. Yes, he had, indeed, been shot. Shot and killed in Roswell, in a post-thunderstorm-ridden arroyo in 1947.
There had been a crash. A UFO crash. He’d been in it.
His whole life had been involved in tracking and, he’d come to find out, seeding extraterrestrial technologies.
That was the huge government secret: he was the huge, fucking secret.
In 1987 he had been assigned to Dulce, New Mexico to work an operation involving extraterrestrials. During his last exchange with his E.T. contacts he had been taken aboard one of their ships and shown things... how to transfer his consciousness into the form they wore while visiting their planet.
But there had been an accident. A crash. Two crashes.
A human-engineered UFO, a HEUFO, developed by his very own U.S. government... all occupants of the craft had been killed upon impact. All humans. Something he had done had gone terribly wrong.
And behind this craft—the one marked with “U.S. Army” on its torn side—had been something else. Something not human.
Him.
But, in another location far to the west and beyond the Foster Ranch debris field, had been another crash. One not much talked about. She and Qxuill and the other occupants of the vehicle he had been in had been dead or dying. Had also been found. And much to his irony, Cherko—the human body of Cherko—had also survived the crash, but only barely.
He’d been separated from his body and had been stuck not on some other planet with an alien race, no... the irony of it was that he had been stranded on his very own planet, in a different time, and as an alien himself.
What was he supposed to have done?
Events had taken on their own momentum.
Cherko had been gunned down by extremely nervous trigger fingers. Nothing more than a mistake. A purely human one. A major case of mistaken identity.
Until someone found his body—his human one, that is—inside the real UFO. Not a debris field, not a HEUFO, but a real live extraterrestrial space ship. Found by some passers-by, then summarily surrounded by yet another contingent of government operatives. Army Counterintelligence. One man in particular. And on this human carcass, on this body that was Cherko, or perhaps more to the point what Cherko had worn for twenty-six years... had been his wallet, within which were his military and civilian IDs.
With late 1980 dates.
That was what all the ruthless secrecy had been about all those years. The stark, unforgiving intimidation and outright murder to keep secrets secret.
It had been bad enough that elements within the U.S. Government had created their own super-advanced flying machine and kept it from their own kind, from those who were led to believe that they had held the supposedly most classified clearances to date, but then to discover that they were also being toyed with by an extraterrestrial race, one they could not ever hope to better even with their super-advanced technology...
And it had also been bad enough that they had found actual extraterrestrial bodies at that crash scene, bad enough that they had actually captured a live alien life form... but to have found a human body amongst that alien wreckage, held in stasis inside an alien ship... alive... bearing documents of a future military member of the very same U.S. Government that was now in possession of this crash site ship and its occupants... that was simply far too much for most 1947 minds.
Besides all the obvious and logical questions that arose, the Army now had to deal with not only an alien craft and bodies—but a very human one, as well. One that had been heavily damaged in the crash. One that, though it had been encompassed within an unknown alien technology, had been damaged beyond the current state of Earthly technology by whatever had caused the crash and landed it in less-than-perfect condition onto the desert floor.
Good God, what had been going on up in those skies above New Mexico?
The UFO—at that time still largely unexplored—had been removed from its crash site and hastily spirited off to various locations, wherein which it eventually ended up at Edwards AFB. Area S-4.
The best minds on the planet poured over the damaged ship, but none had found the human remains, because they had been removed before it had even left New Mexico. While the ship had been temporarily housed in a hangar on the Army’s 509th Bomb Group airfield enroute to its other location, She, the only surviving crew member of that ship had cut a deal with the CIC operative about the crash. She had told the truth, that what the Government had was for real. That the human remains were from the future, and because of a catastrophic onboard ship error, the craft had ended up in 1947 as they had found it. That it had been an error on their part that Captain Cherko, USAF, 1987, had been injured.
Was he still alive?, CIC asked.
The mind of Captain Cherko was, She informed, but his body was quickly dying and mangled beyond any meaningful repair. Then She volunteered the following:
We can save him. We can save him until your race gains the necessary technology to receive him back. Time is an illusion, means nothing to us... and now, to him. It’s more advantageous for him in many ways... aids in his development in ways only he can now appreciate, She said. We will do this, and I will offer myself for your study.
The agreement had been struck.
Cherko’s body had been removed from the ship by another set of aliens who had indeed come in search for him, but men in dark suits had swiftly and deftly descended upon each crash-and-debris site and removed everything, and together with the best minds of the day, began formation of the Black Onion.
The culture of secrecy and disinformation had begun.
There had been no crash.
No aliens.
No nothing. Ever.
And “they” threatened and killed to keep it that way.
She cooperated as long as she could, because, she, too, had been dying as a result of that crash, but not in a way humans thought. And the aliens had taken Cherko and preserved the only part of him worth saving: his mind... by way of his brain. The interface for the mind and the body. The seat of human consciousness, the only thing with an ounce of life left to it.
The brain, Cherko now saw, was an extremely complex interface between the physical and nonphysical, the body and soul. Cherko was kept secret in remote locations where not the U.S. Government—nor any other earthly government—could reach him. But as worldly technologies continued to advance and grow, human surveillance and detection methods also progressed, and it became increasingly difficult to keep him hidden. It wasn’t so much that humans would find what was left of Cherko, but it was the surrounding extraterrestrial support structure they would find that was keeping Cherko alive and led to other areas best kept hidden. The hidden structures, chambers, equipment, and technology used to contain him not of this world.
It has often been said that the best place to hide anything is directly under the seeker’s own nose. That was exactly where Cherko had been secured.
Placed in Earth orbit.
His brain—steeped in and protected by alien technology—had been placed on an extraterrestrial platform, a satellite, impervious to detection by Earthly technology, in a high-end polar orbit. There he was to be kept until Earth had evolved enough to deal with his condition, they were told. Writers, whose very lives and families had been threatened and were left in the dark as to exactly what they were doing, and why, were secretly brought in by the government to fabricate a make-believe fantasy life for him. A secret life that had then been coded into an artificial intelligence program. And the alien race had reached agreements with certain human contacts to help expedite said technological developments through the measured and controlled seeding of alien technology.
Again, the paradoxical irony of Cherko’s Dulce position.
Later, the measured and well-thought-out seeding of mis-information about what exactly had crashed was meticulously leaked into public awareness.
UFOs were the perfect cover.
Took the heat off highly classified government projects. Fact and fiction were blended together.
There had been no government HEUFO.
But there had been a UFO.
Yes.
With extraterrestrial casualties.
One side would deny everything, while the other decried conspiracy!
But things had not turned out exactly as She had expected. After She (as far as the Government knew) had expired in government custody, those in charge had gotten greedy. Begun using the alien technology for self-serving ends, because, in all reality, everything can be reverse engineered if given enough time and resources. Intent.
And because the powers in control had never been able to locate that future Air Force officer found in that 1947 crash.
But Cherko had not been left idle in his condition, either. His mental capacities had been developed and refined by his E.T. handlers. Once Cherko had become accustomed to his situation, he had worked with the extraterrestrials that had given him his continued life.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely is not an empty epithet, and there was a reason, Cherko discovered, that alien contact had not been further advanced. The Human condition has its challenges, those who run the events and affairs of their Race were not about to yield to any non-Human authority.
Enter one young, fast burning general, Robert Mitchell Hammond, who became privy to the on-orbit payload that was Jimmy Cherko.
Hammond had his orbital test bed. His on-orbit platform.
And Hammond had kept it all to himself. But... even generals die... and with Hammond’s death, went the knowledge of Jimmy Cherko’s existence.
There are reasons why there are wars and poverty on a planet with plenty. Reasons why individuals suffer. Having anything handed to a Race that needs to solve its own issues first does not advance that Race. A Race seeking external answers to its own issues does not advance that Race.
And there are reasons why there are renewed pushes for space exploration, math and sciences, studies into the nature of time and space. A rise in the interest of metaphysics. The publicly expressed cover stories are always reasonable enough. They have to be. But for each reasonable proclamation there are always, always the untold, ulterior and covert driving motives....