The Anomaly(100)

“You supposed to be somewhere?”

“No,” he said. “But I can’t waste the whole day talking to a wanker like you. Come have a cigarette with me, then I’m going to fuck off home.”

We stood out on the sidewalk, smoking, withstanding wounded glares from passing health nuts and perfect people.

“Any luck with those pictures?”

“No,” I said. When I checked my phone the day after getting back to Santa Monica, it turned out the only photographs I’d taken inside the complex—of the two sides of the map room—hadn’t come out. Instead of showing the frieze on the ground, there was only a dark, speckled gray fog. “I’ve put them through every piece of software I can find but there’s just nothing there. I don’t think that was a normal kind of light in that room. Far as my phone was concerned, we were in darkness.”

“Ah well. We know what we know.”

We did, even if it was going to have to remain a secret. Because we had zero evidence. Because of the warning I’d received. But mainly because of acts we had been forced to undertake in the closing stages, extreme events that bound us in silence. We’d fallen from grace together. It’s a long fall.

But we knew some things. And I was starting—in notes I was writing straight into a heavily-encrypted website, not even stored locally on my laptop—to join the dots. I’d begun to wonder if the tattered remnants of ancient and anomalously advanced civilizations on Earth might be evidence of previous occasions when there had been a cleansing of life from the planet. I’d considered the idea that the skeletons of greater than human height found in America and other countries—and the way giants crop up in our oldest myths and legends—might be proof of interbreeding between remnants of a population of cleanup beings and the next human line. Because doesn’t it say in Genesis that “there were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them”? Yes, it does. And perhaps I’d even sat on a wall in Venice Beach and had a conversation with a piece of evidence for this.

The data is not in, and someone, somewhere, does not yet believe it’s time to wipe the board and start again. I don’t know whether that’s because that person or culture still has faith in us, despite the violence in our hearts and the mistakes we seem intent on making, or if they’re working to a subtler agenda than we can begin to comprehend.

But look at the world, and the state it’s in. I’m not sure we’ve got much time left to prove the worth of the current round of the experiment.

“So we’ll chat when I get back,” Ken said. “But in the meantime, think about an idea for a replacement episode. I’ve got one, in case it helps. Seen a couple mentions in dodgy forums online to some bunch called the Straw Men.”

“Who are they?”

“No idea, mate. No one’s sure if they even exist. But might be worth a look.”

“Sure,” I said. “I mean, how bad can they be, right?” Then I realized Ken was looking shifty. “What?”

Over his shoulder I saw someone halfway up the next block, coming toward us.

“What the hell is she doing here, Ken?”

“You two are always going to be on the same road,” he said. “I’m just reminding you where the car is.”

He winked and walked away down the street.



Kristy came up to within a few feet of me and stopped. She looked poised, beautiful, self-contained—but also nervous. I’m sure I looked the same, except for the first three parts.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey.”

“How was the Alaska thing?”

“Stupid cold. And we didn’t find much.”

“Bummer.”

“Life goes on.”

“Well, you know what they say. It matters not whether we find. Only that we continue to—”

“Shut up, Nolan,” she said. “And buy me a drink.”

We walked together back into the courtyard, and we stayed there for a very long time.