Giant Floating Head Kevin

Chief Harris said, "No problem. As soon as you're gone, we'll collect statements and then dismiss everyone to their parents."

Looking at the secretary, he gave what were unequivocally orders. "Have every classroom do attendance on a sign-up sheet, real names, who is where, seating chart. Lots of details. Kids have to leave their bags in place, walk out empty handed. Girls can have a wallet or money only, no big purses."

The secretary started writing, probably what she was going to say.

More radio, and they decided it would be okay after I was taken away.

About 10 minutes later, a bunch of big black SUV's pulled up with police lights going on the insides, unmarked cars but with police lights. I'd never seen an unmarked Chevy Suburban before, it was kind of funny. I wondered if they had unmarked Jeep Cherokees and unmarked shitbox Datsun pickups, too.

Funny things occur to you.

Did the military have those over-roof light bars with smiley-face KC Daylighters on them? As in, 'Hello, this is a happy-fun-jeep, we have a.50-cal and grenades! Have a nice day!'

Looking closer at one of the Suburbans, I could see one had front-end damage, obviously he'd crashed into something, and I figured it was probably another car that didn't get out of the way fast enough, it made me smile again. Then, of course, a moment later, I realized I was deep in the shit and all this fuss was going to keep happening around me.

My life was over.

A big team of guys in suits got out of the Suburbans. Their suits bulged and looked funny until they got closer and I could see they weren't wearing 3-piece suits, those were bulletproof vests.

They jogged up to the building.

After some words back and forth outside the office, they came in, had me come with them, and we went out to the SUV's.

They put me in the backseat of one, and even as I was getting in, more of SUV's arrived. All of them with 'US NAVY' written on their sides. Some cars on the side streets, I could see, were being ordered to drive onto the grass to get out of the way.

After a minute, an older guy in the backseat next to me handed me what turned out to be a bulletproof vest of my own, with velcro straps to hold it in place. I admired it and as I figured out how to get it on, he said, "Yeah, it gets hot sometimes, but you gotta do what you gotta do."

They had me in the center seat and put a seat belt on me, so getting the vest on wasn't totally easy.

The 'gotta do' aspect of putting on the vest made some sense, I could see that, they were guarding me. They didn't look at me too much, though, mostly their eyes were scanning around us.

I asked the guy where he was from and he said Glenview Naval Air Station, which wasn't really that far off, I just had kind of forgotten about it.

We drove to Glenview and the base was a hive of activity. Everyone had weapons out and were running everywhere they went, like actual running, not just pro-forma jogging. There was a set of armored vehicles across the front of the front gate that they had to move to let us in, and I saw guys on the turrets of those vehicles, helmets and headsets on, looking like they were ready for war.

In Chicago.

Riiiiiiight.

On the other hand, it made sense just as much as anything else made sense that morning, so yeah, what the hell, sure.

We drove well into the base, to a big concrete building. It was surrounded by the new kind of military jeeps, humm-vee's, they called them, but again with giant machine guns on the top.

Piling out, they walked around the outside of me like I was something valuable, and we went into the building and downstairs, past a bunch of guards, to a sort of big rec room.

As we walked in, an older man in a dark-blue military uniform and tie with some rank insignia and the nameplate, "Wilkins" walked up to us. "This him?"

They looked at me and I said, "Kevin Kooper, sir."

"Tell me what I need to know."

I was frank and held out my arms, "I don't know anything! I was in class, and this thing, this noise started, and then the guy started talking. I have ... NO idea what's going on!"

Looking at me, he asked, "How old are you, son?"

"Eighteen, sir. Just turned, 3 weeks ago."

"Where are your parents? Family?"

"Dad's probably freaking, he works at ____, purchasing agent. Mom's a Presbyterian minister, at First Pres on Oak. She's gotta be freaking, too..."

One of the aides standing nearby said, "We have the parents sir, just got them, they're inbound, eta 9 minutes. Cap is flying high cover."

Admiral Wilkins, it turned out, walked over to some other people at a phone bank with some big computer screens (this place was a command center long before I got there), and spoke to some people, out of my earshot.

He came back and sighed, like he was starting to relax, "I've got to call the Joint Chiefs. Kevin? Good to meet you..." He shook my hand, the first overtly friendly thing he did. "Johnson? Get Kevin here over there and settled down, and start getting a statement. Start with a life history, I'm gonna get quizzed on that, I need big details first."

Johnson turned out to be a Commander, with some stripes on his shoulder, and he was joined by two guys with badges hanging on their suit jacket pockets that said, 'Special Agent' and 'NCIS', whatever that was. They had notebooks and a tape recorder; we went over to a table in the corner and sat down.

They wanted Every Single Detail, first about my life and family in general, then what I did that morning, anything unusual that happened, no matter how small, in the past week, etc.

My parents showed up, accompanied by some troops with MP armbands, and Mom and Dad gushed and gave me big hugs. They said my older sister, Rachel, was getting picked up in Boston but kept in that city so all of us weren't in the same place at the same time.

The military had odd ideas of safety, I thought.

Still, it made sense. If my genetics were so damned important, maybe my sisters would be too, if anything happened to me, or my parents, or all of us.

They took my parents off, separately, after introducing them to the Admiral, and told us they'd be asking lots and lots of questions.

Some other big group of guys showed up, more NCIS people. I asked about that, curious, and they said it meant Naval Criminal Investigative Service, sorta Navy detective-cops. I thought that was kind of cool, that the Navy had their own 'detectives', but they said the Army and Air Force had their own, too. They seemed pretty nice, but very serious about getting questions answered, concise but complete.

The new guys took over, got notes from the first ones, and took me to a room down the hall to start all over. I had to laugh, this was exactly like the cop shows.

The guys sat me down at a table and turned on some video equipment and two different tape recorders. The older guy spoke first. He seemed nice enough, but seriously worried about something, and I hoped it wasn't me.

"Kevin. Here's what's going to happen. We're going to ask you a whole bunch of questions, like, describe your entire life, recent stuff first. Then, we'll ask you again, and you'll tell us the same stuff all over again, maybe with slightly more or different details, if you can. Then, we give you some water or pop or something, and we do it all again. Then, we compare notes with what your parents and sister say, and we come up with questions where your answers are different. Make sense?"

It did make sense, I guessed. "Uh, yeah?"

"Good. We're not trying to accuse you of anything, but any clue we have about you, might give us a clue about this guy. So, we need to be complete, but especially if you had an interest in something. Now, I gotta tell you, if you've done something marginally, or even actually illegal? We Absolutely Do Not Care. It's Fine, Just Fine. We really, really want any clues about this other guy, and you're the only person we can ask."

I shrugged okay.

"Start with this morning, describe every tiny little thing you did starting when you woke up...."

I told him. Them, really, I told them everything. Absolutely everything I knew about me - I told them, and then I backed up to the previous month, the previous year, etc. Somebody dropped off a copy of our high school yearbook, and they asked me to name all the people I knew, etc.

They wanted to know which girls had EVER looked interesting to me, who I'd even vaguely thought about dating, who my friends were dating, everything. Even my junior high stuff, they wanted to know who I'd been friends with as a kid, played with, met at parties, which parties, who held them, who was there, what did we do... WOW, everything!

We kept going for maybe 4 hours? It was hard to know.

Eventually, we took a break and I came back out into the main room and met up with my parents again, sitting around a conference table. We didn't have long to chat, though.

The Admiral came over and sat at the head, laying out a file folder with some computer printouts.

"Kevin, Sir, Ma'am, we've got a picture built up now of who you are, we think, who Rachel [my sister] is, too, and reasonable biographies of most of the kids in your school, plus the teachers and administrative staff. Even the janitors and cooks. We know a lot about everyone. And, none of it says 'national security threat' to us."

I almost said, "Duh!" out loud, but I held my tongue.

"That said, we're still in the early hours of this thing. We'll have forensics teams going over the scene for a week at least. I'm obliged to tell you you're being held with us for two reasons, and you may already know one of them."

My dad said, "Material witness warrant, Mr. Barrons said."

"Correct. You're material witnesses to about 20 Federal crimes."

I asked, "What crimes?" My mother interrupted my question to ask, "When can we go home, then?"

Admiral said, "Under a FISA warrant, your house and all its contents have been seized and are currently being cataloged and analyzed. Your house is probably mostly empty by now, Mrs. Kooper, it's being reconstructed and cataloged here on base in an empty hangar, and until my investigators say it has no value, it has value, and that value is that i get to tell the President of the United States that I'm doing Everything I Can to find out what happened today."

My parents nodded at that. I did, too. I didn't want to be combative with him.

He continued, "Given the magnitude of the situation, it's unlikely that any of you will ever want to be seen in public again, at least for several years."

We were confused, "What happened?"

"The voice you heard wasn't just coming out of the sky. It was being broadcast on a huge number of AM, FM, Television, shortwave, military frequencies, aviation frequencies, all of them. Not all the broadcasts were simple, though. Some were very strange encodings of the signals, and I have engineers telling me that the radio broadcasts had nearly no sidebands. That is, no harmonics, it's nearly impossible."

Dad asked, "So... Chicago couldn't get FM radio?"

"Worldwide, sir. Worldwide. Not line of sight either. Massive disruption. The entire world knows, at least the ones that speak English, that Kevin is special. That paints a huge target on his back, and on yours because you're his parents, because there's Those Kinds of People out there."

"Oh." We kind of swallowed that.

"The President is going to make a public statement in about 20 minutes, you can listen to it if you like...."

They let us go to the bathroom and get some more food, MRE packets or sandwiches (white bread, yuck) off at a corner table. All the while, a pair of MP's, a guy who looked a couple of years older than me and seriously buff, and a gal who moved with a grace that screamed 'martial arts' or something.

Finally, the address, President Dukakis:

"My fellow Americans. As you may have already heard, this morning at approximately 10:45 am local central time, an immense 50-foot-tall 3-D image of a man's head was projected into the air above the high school in Clintonville, Illinois, near Chicago. Along with that projection, the man's words rang out at high volume for the people around to hear. Further, that image and voice were broadcast on most major radio and TV frequencies in use all around the world."

"We do not have any way to corroborate, to verify, what this man said. There is no known technology on this Earth that can come anywhere close to making that image appear, or broadcasting those radio signals. Therefore, we have to have at least an initial reaction that the broadcast was genuine."

"In light of this, my staff have this morning drafted several executive orders which I immediately signed. They are as follows. One. All coal-fired power plants located in the United States, or under direct control of the United States, are to be turned off, effective immediately. If you are at one of these facilities, please turn off your production after this broadcast concludes. If your company is a large-scale consumer of electrical power, please consider this notice to shut down effective immediately and we'll figure out how to get you back on as soon as we can. If you don't, we can come around and cut your wires manually. I have broad emergency powers to do what I like on this, and I WILL safeguard our country and the world."

"Two. All fishing vessels in U.S. territorial waters should return to their home port immediately. All U.S. flagged vessels are to consider themselves impounded on arrival - secure your ships and come ashore. All vessels of whatever size engaged in, or transporting fish, should release their loads back into the sea immediately and return to port empty. Failure to do this may result in your vessel being permanently seized under eminent domain or military necessity laws."

"Three. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is hereby directed to either mine or contract to begin large scale lithium mining, and refine it to sufficient quality as to be useful in batteries that will be developed to use said ore, as soon as such batteries are developed. Similar Defense Production Act mining shall purchase as much manganese, magnesium, cobalt, copper, and many other minerals deemed necessary to enable electrification of all cars and trucks."

"Four. All U.S. automakers are hereby requested, and will be required by law as soon as suitable legislation is drafted, to cease production of gasoline or diesel powered cars within 2 years. These vehicles should be replaced with electric-motor and lithium-battery variants. This is nonbinding, but the first company that comes out with such vehicles will likely be able to bid to replace all 17 million U.S. postal service and other government agency vehicles."

"Five. NASA is hereby directed to begin research and development work to build fully re-usable rockets. The goal of this program is to place, within 4 years, at least a set of U.S. astronauts on the moon, and within 5 years, on Mars. I've further directed that as soon as practicable, one or more self-sufficient colonies be built at such distances that a minimum of 6 months travel time is normal and expected, as a quarantine buffer."

"Six. The CDC is directed to begin preparations for fighting pandemics, including procurement under the Defense Production Act, of all medical equipment required to effectively detect, halt, slow, or cure such pandemics. Colleges and Universities are hereby requested to encourage students to study disease prevention and cures, to sequence DNA or create equipment and techniques for doing so."

"Seven. The energy department is to immediately begin research and engineering work to build within a year a set of thorium-based nuclear reactors that can operate without human monitoring and in safety regimes so extremely fail-safe that we can be assured that 3 mile island type situations cannot ever occur with them. These will be short-term solutions and they will be safely decommissioned as soon as other renewable electrical generation is online."

"Eight. The Department of Agriculture is immediately directed to seek out locations both in the United States and abroad, where humans live in close proximity to wild or domesticated animals. Once found, they are to study ways to discourage or stop this practice, or incentivize alternatives."

"Nine. The individual known as Kevin Kooper and his family are to be considered innocent bystanders in this situation, and the Dr. Kooper that spoke today even said so. Thus, as private U.S. citizens, they will be accorded all possible deference. We are still working out how best to help that situation, so there's not much to say about him. By all appearances, he is a normal high school kid caught up in this."

"Lastly, ten. We will be unveiling a series of Defense Production Act guarantees for purchases of the above equipment and products. This will include: solar PV cells, wind turbines, DNA analysis and possible sequencing project equipment, and equipment that can protect an area of the sea from having fishing vessels harvest from that area."

"It appears we have our work cut out for us, and we pray to Almighty God that either this warning was deceptive, in which case we're doing the right things for the wrong reason, or that it was true, in which case we're doing the exact things that it recommends we do. Thank you, and good night."

It was 8 pm by this time, and after some more conversations with the military people there, they gave us each a cot in a separate room off the main hall, with two guards by the door, one facing out and another facing the door.

I was just really, really tired for some reason. I was pretty sure it was because I normally had a coke, with caffeine, at lunch, and that day I hadn't had any.

Sleep...

First Morning

About 7 am I got up and used their bathroom, under guard, of course, which was continuing to be mighty odd. When I got back, there was a large gym bag on the floor outside my room, and the guard explained it had fresh clothes, a 'dop kit' of bathroom stuff, and to please follow him.

A larger bathroom farther down the hall had showers in individual stalls.

I went in one, got a shower and shampoo under the watchful eyes of two military guys with MP armbands. They gave me Navy clothes - sweats including black sneakers in my size (!) and a t-shirt. The deodorant was kind of odd smelling but mostly okay, and the toothpaste wasn't my brand either, but what the heck.

Dressed and clean, I put my old clothes in a different gym bag they'd provided (could they think of everything?) and came out, ready to face the world... sort of.

My mom and dad were already up and showered, though they looked kind of haggard. We hugged, and they told me they'd spoken with [my sister] Rachel and she was fine, on a military base in Virginia.

We talked for a while. They told me they'd talked to my grandmothers (both of my grandfathers had passed before I was born - one from smoking/cancer, the other from an infected cut he got in a farming accident).

I was embarrassed that my grandmothers knew about the fact that this guy had told me to have lots of sex, but I didn't know how to say that to my mom. I was kind of shy. I was working my way out of it, gradually, and realizing that, sitting at the table there with her, I decided I had to be more up-front about things.

Deciding to be more up-front with your mom and Doing That were in conflict. I loved her and everything, but I was embarrassed? It's hard to describe.

I looked around and kept track of what was going on around me, at least somewhat. The focus in the room was the Admiral, who was still working over on the other side of the room. A continuous flow of people were reporting to a conference table of people near him (on phones or writing), and sometimes he'd come over and ask them things.