Abduction of a Fool

It was fall when finances allowed Will to make his pilgrimage to the base of Mt. Doe. It wasn't the ideal season, having to cut through the couples on vacation to see the pretty colors as the leaves changed, but he strode confidently from the pile of incipient scrap he called a car to the entrance of the hotel, careful not to bump his luggage against anything so the equipment inside would stand a chance at working properly after a trek halfway up the hiking trail. Several thousand dollars, it had all cost him, from nonbelievers who considered him an easy mark; their goods were the real deal, though. Night vision, long-range camera lenses with high-speed shutters behind them, camouflage, and a small pistol he still didn't feel sure about and wouldn't want to be caught illegally carrying.

There was thankfully no line as he approached the desk for his reservation.

"Name?" the local girl behind the desk asked.

He gave it, she offered to take his bag and he refused, of course.

"Ah, well at least I'll show you to your room, sir," she said as she retracted her hand from reaching for the bag that was still clutched to his chest. She was obviously weirded out, hidden behind the deniability of professionalism, but she knew now why he was here specifically, and said so in the elevator. "Going to see the crash site?"

"Yes." It wouldn't matter that another human knew what he was doing there, she'd seen his type before. He'd only seen a glimpse, but he knew that the gift shop off the lobby would sell baubles and treats shaped like little grey men. An ally back home had once brought back taffy in said shape which had tasted fine.

There's only so far you can fuck up taffy, but that's neither here nor there.

"I hear you get the best foxfire around seven in the morning," she said. "We sell lanterns and maps in the gift shop, but we did stop doing tours before I was hired." Hm, she was cute in a sort of local way, freckles across the nose, a slightly boyish figure, sensibly short hair; she had to be the active sort. These were only factual observations, he had no prurient interest in some random normie.

"You call them foxfire?" he asked, turning his mind to more important matters.

"Oh yeah, you guys call them 'orbs' or something, right? I've only ever thought of them as foxfire, since it's cuter."

"The purpose isn't exactly to be 'cute', it's to be descriptive to our fellow allies."

"Allies?" She giggled. "You sound like you're a part of some kind of special force unit. Are you? Wanna hunt some aliens, right?"

That was normies for you, latching onto what they thought was strange terminology for an excuse to make fun. The joke was on them in the end, when they learned the truth that had been hidden all this time and they would have to admit that the nerds and the freaks had been onto something that they never imagined could be true. But of course that was expecting too much out of the simple-minded layman; most allies knew that at that point those same simpletons would strut about saying that they too knew all along that humans couldn't possibly be alone in such a vast universe. The mockery of the past would be forgotten and some new reason to despise 'freaks and losers' would be invented.

For Will, it was enough that he know he was right and they were wrong. He'd seen the signs they were too stupid or unobservant to notice; he'd learned and thought through problems dismissed out of hand by so-called scientists. The revenge didn't matter, only being right mattered.

"Pretty quiet guy, aren't you?" the girl asked.

"What?" Well, he was trapped in an elevator with the normie for the next minute, so he though he might as well make small-talk.

"I asked, you wanna hunt aliens?"

Will closed his eyes so she wouldn't see them roll. He wasn't so far gone as some comrades who couldn't hold back their disdain for common people. "Of course I don't want to hunt aliens, that would be stupid."

"Right, right, because they'd just point their disintegrator beams at you and that would be that, right? Just another missing person case in the woods; I think we'd search for at least a week but of course you'd just be atoms or whatever." She had a cheeky smile as she apparently recounted a response by another loose-lipped comrade in the past. It was a popular spot for a reason, but the locals who made some bank off the crash site's proximity weren't combative as a rule, to protect their meal ticket. "I'm kidding, we only have a couple missing people a year, and they mostly just walk off the marked path at night. That's why it's so important to follow the glowing markers we set up all through the trees. Of course, I don't have to tell our normal guests," she said as they reached his floor and he stepped out of the elevator, waited until it was nearly closed to finish, "just you freaks."

And that was why you didn't get attached to normies. Will dispassionately flipped off the elevator door and went to his room, plopped down for a mid-afternoon nap as he knew he wouldn't be getting any sleep over the next couple nights.

--

On night one, Will disproved a common stereotype of unfitness by marching all the way to the crash site under the cover of sunset's half darkness and a ghillie suit. He was huffing and puffing by the end, but got himself under control soon enough that the plumes of condensation in the cool and cooling air didn't seem likely to reveal his position in the bushes, prone and pointing an infrared camera down into the depression in the side of the mountainside.

The official story was that a couple of locals had gone up with shovels and pickaxes to make a pit and claim aliens had crash-landed right there for the publicity it gave this otherwise out-of-the-way former logging town. But then, they never explained the rock chips found lodged into the nearby trees that Will's allies had found, knurls grown around them. The timeline itself simply didn't make sense; grass grew over the soil in the pit, though not the exposed blasted rock layer, and the canopy in the earliest pictures taken of the place was already repaired from the landing.

'Of course there isn't any damage to the canopy,' people had said, 'because the hillbillies didn't think to fake that part of it.'

Those same hillbillies had gone to the trouble of making an entire replica spaceship, a flying saucer, out of discarded logging equipment, so why would they not think to replicate the whole of the crash? Simple: they'd found the crash site, hauled off the real thing, and replaced it with a rather good reproduction. Will did believe there had been a hoax, but the truth was just below the surface, a hoax covering up the real thing because that was all it took to keep the normies from looking any deeper.

Right, normies were difficult to trick, but easy. Tell one the truth and they'd approach it skeptically, since they were so accustomed to being fooled, but tell them they'd figured out a lie and they'd rest on their laurels, certain that the world had only one layer of truth and one layer of untruth. It was so difficult to make any of them see the bigger picture: an alien could walk the streets in plain view, greeting people and shaking their hands, and they would guffaw at the level of "special effects" used in the "obvious fakery".

Though they wouldn't use those words. Normies were pretty stupid.

Out in nature, Will lay quiet and motionless as he kept watch with one eye through infrared, leaving his other to acclimate to the darkness just in case the alien flared up something hot and blinded his sensors. Yet another camera recorded night vision from its home-made tape mount on the infrared camera. His pistol he kept in the belly pocket of his coat; he'd wished he could have gone to a range or something to practice with it, but it was only for a last-ditch self-defense effort in the worst case scenario. He didn't have it in him to think that the aliens would be hostile right off the bat.

For how long they had been watching humanity, at least since the first sightings decades ago but potentially so much longer, he hoped that whoever he met would be able to understand, if not speak, English. He could hardly be expected to learn alienese when there was nothing to study from. But then, they had to be peaceful, for how long they had been around and the level of technology necessary to cross the interstellar ocean, and not attack humanity which was, in its infantile state, still capable of wiping out all life known to it with a few button presses.

Oh, cow mutilations, abductions, sure, but nothing major. Humanity could spare some livestock and a handful of missing people if that was what it took to join the universal community. In the grand scheme, Will couldn't imagine a star-faring race that was incapable of casually wiping out humanity from orbit and taking whatever might be of value besides the life.

He waited, on his belly, eventually cramping up as he was raised on his elbows, until sunrise...

So... the hotel's breakfast bar was nice enough. It better have been, for the amount he was spending. He ate waffles and scramble with sausages in most of a ghillie suit right out in the open with an understandable bubble of other patrons around him.

And then that girl pierced his bubble with her own plate, scarcely filled. "Didn't catch anything, did'ja?"

Will patiently finished chewing his sausage without giving her the attention she obviously craved. Pretty girls could be like this, he remembered too much from darker days in public education; they would act just interested enough to make some joke and run laughing to her friends that you thought she could possibly be interested in you or anything you said. Just sitting there, in his personal space, sneering as she awaited his answer, she was prodding an old, worn scar.

"You're creeping out the other guests, so..." she said.

"There's nothing illegal about wearing camouflage in public."

"Of course you would know that. Didn't help you find anything, though, did it? I bet they have some kind of super-cool sensing thingie that can go right through whatever these, like, astroturf thingies are made of."

His suit rustled as he continued to eat. "They have appeared to normal hikers before. it's just another layer of security."

She stretched out over the table, looked up at his averted gaze and laughed. "You could always do what they did and lie about seeing something~ Won't your buddies be impressed when you come back and say they came and went too fast to get a good picture? They all know it's a lie, too, or are all of you guys crazy?"

Will stopped mid-bite and glared. "You're pretty rude for someone who works in a place selling alien kitsch."

Irritatingly, she shrugged and yawned. "Meh, you just looked like you would be more fun to pick on that most of them. So serious~ 'no, you can't take my bag, what if you break some of my equipment that can totally sense aliens even though they don't exist', haha. And you'll buy your fair share of merch no matter what, even if you don't see something you can convince yourself was an alien, so it's not a real loss."

"Keep laughing, the investigation will eventually find something concrete that they can't cover up."

"Sure, sure, and then you can get to work on sasquach and the Easter bunny. Actually, can you start on the Easter bunny; it's cuter."

He felt like grinding his teeth, but the calories weren't going to wait for him before cooling, so he set his mind to ignoring everything but bare necessity.

But she just kept on going. "D'ja know that hole was just blasted by my uncle and daddy? They made a fake ship and everything so people came to see it and take pictures, all that. There have always been weirdos that take it too seriously, but it's not like we ever claimed that it was real and everyone else just went along with the fun. When I was a little girl, the thing used to be my playground, up until I got a cut and mom said it was a tetanus trap. Too bad, there was this one nook that was just right for curling up and taking a nap in the sun, since the light came through at just the right angle through the port up top. Then we had to remove it once the forest service got wise... Even though I could sneak in and take another nap now that I'm grown, it's just not the same where it is. Are you listening to me?"

He was not.

She tapped his shoulder. "Wanna see it? It's still fake, but I bet you'd like a pic."

--

She'd had him sit in the bed of a truck while she drove, since the passenger seat was filled with the more-important-than-his-comfort pile of fast food wrappers. For a man who had spent nearly every waking moment the night before on his belly, getting banged around in the bed of a truck could only rattle his body so much more, but he did draw stares by townsfolk, looking like their neighbor was moving a human-shaped bush.

Soon enough, down a dirt road, they came to someone's house and more specifically to someone's rusty-ass garage. The girl dirtied her hands pulling a rusty chain to open the shutter door and there it was in all its "glory".

Oh, Will had seen the pictures taken of this object as it lay in the woods, in its own crater, but the girl fluttered her arms to present a massive hunk of holey rust in the very general outline of a flying saucer with room for, count them, two passengers at most.

"How did this ever fool anyone?" He put his hand on the outside, scraped a bit at some thick rust with his fingernail. "The outside's literally just sheet metal, and that fin on the back is some kind of saw bent out of shape."

The girl had climbed some stacked crates to stand atop the curve of the canopy. Thankfully she was wearing overalls so she couldn't accuse him of any untoward behavior while he watched her. "You know how most people are, after all. A lot of the time you can just tell them they're right and they'll come up with the details all on their own. I mean, you still believe in aliens, don't you? Despite knowing this was a hoax?"

Will stood back to take a picture because she was right that his allies back home would want to see this, and the girl turned her face away until he was finished.

"The crater is still a crater," he said, "no matter what was put there after the fact. We have the records of the falling object that triangulate on that position weeks before this thing was placed there. I don't believe your family dragged away the genuine article, don't get me wrong, but there is too much evidence of the crash itself to deny that it happened."

She'd laid atop the rusted canopy, on a towel that had already been there for the purpose. "Like what?"

"Debris. An ally of mine once spent a full week in the crater tying strings to each piece of debris he could find and calculated the direction and force that was produced to make them fly how they did. He concluded that explosives would have produced a more even spread, that only an object falling at re-entry speeds from the south could have affected the surroundings in that way."

"Oh yeah, I remember that guy." She rolled onto her back and yawned, stretching her arms. "Weirdo... so that's what all those bobbins were for."

"He's actually a forensic scientist."

"Still dumb enough to think aliens exist, though."

"If you have a better explanation I'd like to hear it!"

She stared straight through him. "Do you mean that, or are you going to keep getting ruffled?"

"Of course I mean it." Will smirked, confident that he'd heard every argument already. "A true skeptic invites any argument."

"What if it was a meteorite?" she said, not even making the mistake of calling it an asteroid.

"None of the debris appears to have come from interstellar rock, and yes it looks different than the stuff found locally."

"But what if it was just granite?"

"We would still expect to find debris of some kind that wouldn't resemble the area, and the rock layer was barely exposed by the impact in the first place."

She rolled again, supporting herself on her elbows much the way Will had spent the night before. "Right? It's such a problem trying to keep the hole open in the rainy season when it just wants to mud up. But then, shouldn't there still be debris if it were a ship?"

He shrugged. "For all I know, the aliens don't produce such shoddy products that it would break up. And then there's the fact of how small the craft had to have been."

"Oh?"

"This thing," he said, slapping the side, "is just about the right size for the impact crater and the scale of scattered debris. Assuming that the visitors are around our height, which is a fairly realistic assumption, a craft this size could only support the movement of a couple. I don't think the craft was alone, I think it had to be a scouting vehicle."

"Why would aliens be the same size as us?" she asked.

"The square-cube law is in effect everywhere. Depending on the gravity of their home planet, the variable alone would have effected the scale of organisms that could comfortably evolve. But then you get to things like the availability of whatever they are evolved to breathe, certain other chemicals; in the past just here on earth there used to be such a concentration of oxygen in the air that insects grew to be dozens of times as big as they are currently. See, the organisms that produce oxygen were so abundant at the time that there was just a ton of it. Though the same amount would be toxic to you and I right now."

"O-kay, so what if the aliens aren't at all like you are?"

"We only have the one currently life-supporting planet in our solar system to go off... It's reasonable to use it as a template for all life when we don't have any other information to go off of. But whatever form they end up taking, there's not reason we can't learn to accept one another."

She grinned. "So, like, what about tentacle monsters?"

He blushed. "Body language would be a lot more important in that case, I think, unless they have a pheromone-based language... Anyway, they can only be twice or so larger than humans, given the craft's approximate size, unless it wasn't manned. And I think after it fell, its wreckage was either picked up by its fellows or it wasn't so damaged that it couldn't leave of its own power."

"Ah," she said. "Wanna get some pics of the inside before you go?"

"...Yes."

--

After not enough sleep, Will returned to his spot in the woods, this time with a stolen hotel pillow folded under his chin so that his back hopefully wouldn't kill him in the morning.

He blinked, it seemed like a long one, and then there was a light above him.

And he wasn't in a bush anymore... and he was naked... on a pure white floor.

He shot to his feet and took stock of his surroundings, which didn't take long at all. He was naked in an austere, sterile white room about twelve feet long given his wingspan, with nothing but a similarly featureless bench along one wall which ended up feeling squishy to the touch like bedding. There was no door to leave, and the light in the room seemed not to come only from the featureless ceiling but also from below since he wasn't drawing a shadow on its surface.

Will put his back against the bench/bed's wall as this was the one he was more-or-less sure nobody would be entering through. They had to come inside somehow, unless he'd been packaged up like cargo and shoved aside to be cracked out of the room like an egg later.

But I was right! He took solace in the fact enough that he could calm his heart. Not only had he been right about their existence, but they had acknowledged him in some way. Now all that remained was to see just what his first contact would entail.

"You are awake, then?" a voice came from seemingly nowhere, and Will nodded since it was clear he was being observed. "Apologies that we were not able to bring your items along. This environment must remain sterile." A robe appeared from nowhere and fell into Will's lap. "This should suffice for the time being."