Authors: Fiona Quinn
W
e didn’t land at an airport, but on a barely paved highway, and then taxied into a freshly mowed field. The last bit of light melted over the horizon, as we sat beneath the massive pines. I laid a map of Wyoming across my lap and tried to figure out how far out into nowhere we had travelled.
A pickup truck made its way over the grass and parked beside us. Spyder jumped down from the plane and hugged the giant who emerged from the truck’s cab. I had never seen Spyder hug a man before. This guy had my instant respect.
As I made my way over for introductions, I was startled by the sheer size of the guy. I was used to huge men – Randy and Deep were the smallest guys on my team, and they were both six feet tall. Jack was the largest, at six-foot five. This man, well, I think he might give LeBron James a run for his money. He wore jeans with dust caked into the seat and thighs, and his boots could have walked a few hundred miles, they were so worn down in the heel. He had plaited his hair into a long, thin silver chord, tied at the end with a bit of red cloth, and hidden on top by his black cowboy hat.
That was all the observation I got in before his arm swooped me up, and I got hugged while my feet dangled a good foot and a half off the ground. Seemed hugging was a requirement around this guy. But that was alright. There was something incredibly safe and kind about him ,and the embrace felt like a gift.
“General Coleridge, this is the daughter of my heart, Lexi Sobado.”
“Lexi, awesome!”
So not what I expected out of a general. Not his look, not his demeanor, not his choice of words. I decided right then and there I’d better put my paradigms aside. I was in for a mind-bending conversation.
The general went around the back of his truck and pulled out a bison skin. He hefted it over to a fire circle and laid the rug down, covering a log and spreading it across the ground. He gestured me over, and I happily snuggled down into the fur, using the log as a backrest. The general squatted to light the campfire already stacked and ready for a spark.
The fire he had coaxed blazed up from the middle of the circle. I welcomed the heat shining on my face. The temperature had dropped off with the sunlight. It must have been in the teens. I couldn’t check my phone for weather information; there was no cell service this far from anywhere.
Spyder seemed completely at ease, staring up at the Wyoming night sky as it filled to overflowing with stars—so many that it made my distinguishing constellations all but impossible.
The general tipped his head toward Spyder. “Spyder said you needed to ask some questions about remote viewing work as a matter of some urgency.” He took his long stick and poked the fire until a fountain of sparks flew into the air. “Things he couldn’t answer for you himself.”
“I. . . Spyder, are you a remote viewer?”
“No, Lexicon, but while the Galaxy Project was in operation, I benefitted considerably from their intelligence-gathering. Indeed, it saved my life more than once. But I only know how to apply the information, not how it was procured.”
“Yes, sir.” I focused on the general. “I was hoping you would shed some light for me, please. I came across a file that I want to show you.” I brought my backpack with me and sat beside him, pulled out the papers I’d photographed from General Elliot’s file, and handed them over.
General Coleridge reached for the reports and read them carefully. I moved back over to my original space so he didn’t feel crowded. So I didn’t feel overwhelmed.
His gaze raised and held on my face. “You seemed to have survived just fine,” he said matter-of-factly.
“I think this assignment might have had longer-reaching effects, and that’s why I asked to speak with you.”
He nodded. “This work is part of the unexplained world, but it is extremely well-documented and absolutely nothing like the woo woo stuff portrayed in the media.”
“Sir, I’m not judgmental about your project. I’ve had enough inexplicable paranormal experiences in my lifetime to know not to believe or disbelieve any given situation, but to assess the merits of each. You don’t need to tread cautiously with me. I’m here to understand a set of circumstances.”
“I always like to check in with folks before I start spouting off about a bunch of things that are meaningless to them. How about you start off by giving me a bit from your understanding of these reports and what a remote viewer does?”
“Yes, sir.” I knew it was a test of some kind. Surely he wasn’t checking on my vocabulary. Maybe he wanted to hear the terms I used to assess whether I was a pain-in-the-keister reporter here to mock him in print—again.
He settled back, stretching his legs out toward the fire and crossing them at the ankle.
I cleared my throat and sent a quick glance over to Spyder. Spyder had closed his eyes with his hands behind his head, and looked like he had melded with the universe.
“Back during the Cold War,” I began. “The military approached you with a problem. The assignment was to help develop the Galaxy Project.”
The general nodded and looked like he had settled in for a good story. I wasn’t sure I could deliver.
“The military’s remote viewing team was located out of Fort Meade, Maryland. Close enough to DC and far enough away, too, I suppose. A little physical distance was probably good for the project, since Galaxy was never popular.”
“My dear, ‘never popular’ is putting it mildly. We had to fight tooth and nail for every cent we got to fund us. We had to fight against the debunkers and naysayers.”
“But Galaxy had scientists. Statisticians. . .”
“You’re right.” He pursed his lips and nodded. “It should have made things simple. But it was too scary a thought for most folks.”
“Too scary?”
“We’ll get to that part, I promise. You can’t talk about this subject long before you get the daylights scared out of you. So, the problem was that the statistician was pitted in this contest against a debunker. The statistician, she was mad as hell that the senate asked her to quantify and qualify our effectiveness, and yet all of the data was redacted or classified.”
“She couldn’t. I mean, what was she supposed to do with no data?”
“Exactly. From the record, she was able to prove we had a good program going on. We were making a big impact on the safety of our country.”
“But there was a debunker?”
“A debunker with a massive ego problem. He hated the idea that he would be proven wrong. So he got nasty. He leaked certain information to the media. All of it looked like the government was paying us high wages to stare goats to death — to try to stop a goat’s heart from beating with our ‘laser-eyed vision.’” He made his eyes all crazy and held his arms out like a zombie’s. He sniffed loudly, then wiped his nose with the back of his hand. A body language tell for disdain.
“When that got out to the public, the senators didn’t want Galaxy’s woo-woo crap to muck up their next election cycle.” The general spun his hands in the air like he was a character out of Sorcerer’s Apprentice. “They distanced themselves as quick as they could—tried to save face by making us the brunt of their jokes. Media had such a great time with the idea that the taxpayer had wasted twenty-million dollars on a bunch of guys dancing in the incense vapors that we lost all of our funding.” He stared into the fire, then wiped his hand across his nose again. “One day I woke up without a job. All of the remote viewers were let go. Just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “With no employment prospects.”
“I’m sorry, sir. That seems so wrong.” I sat cross-legged with my gloved hands entwined in my lap, leaning forward to sop up his every word. “You defended your country honorably, if unconventionally, and to lose your job . . . They didn’t reassign you all?”
“I was retirement age and had my twenty years in with the army, so I was fine. I get my pension, and I do some side work doing remote viewing for a bunch of companies and some individuals. Others were not in my position. Imagine trying to find a decent-paying job when you can’t account for the last so many years of your life because your work is classified. If you do tell someone what you did, well they’d laugh you right out the door. It looked on paper like we’d been in prison or homeless on the street with drug problems.” He glanced over at Spyder, who gave him a nod without opening his eyes – how could Spyder do that? — then the General’s focus landed on me. “Some guys tried their hand at memoirs to bring in revenue and to get some of the real story out into the mainstream—maybe balance the hilarity.” Even through the curtain of smoke, I could see his jaw tightened. “What we did saved lives. There’s nothing funny about our work.”
“Yes, sir. I’ve read all of the autobiographies I could find. They don’t look like they were financially successful. Not enough to support someone.”
“Not successful, no. Uncle Sam didn’t want them to be. Operatives threatened the editors and publishing houses. Imagine, if you will, being put into a mental health hospital and sedated into a coma to keep you quiet. That’s what happened to one guy on our team. Some of the authors had their homes broken into, and there were a few attempts on their lives. One time, they almost took out one of our viewer’s whole family by setting up a generator in their garage and filling the house with carbon monoxide.”
“But why?” I was horrified that the government I loved and protected might kill an innocent family or treat its military so badly.
“Because if no one took this seriously, then people would stop looking at the program. The US needs this to be a joke, so they can continue their work in secrecy. Make no mistake. We have psychic spies at work today.”
“You said you do remote work for companies. Could you amass information from one company to give to another? That kind of collection isn’t regulated by laws, right?”
“If there were laws regulating such data gathering, it would substantiate that remote viewing was legitimate and scientifically sound. So there are no laws governing this kind of work, and I doubt there ever will be. What we have are ethics. I personally view something like that as industrial espionage. If your intent was to steal someone’s intellectual property, then you are morally corrupted. The individuals participating in Galaxy were above reproach. Highly moral people. But having said that, it doesn’t mean that I haven’t done work for industry. I have.”
“I’m sure that you have non-disclosure contracts, but would you consider doing any work on an assignment that targeted Iniquus?”
“General Elliot’s group?
Hell no
. I respect the man too much. You know he was the general in charge of Galaxy?”
No, I hadn’t known that.
“He put his head on the chopping block to save us. We owe him a debt of gratitude, though some of the remote viewers don’t agree. A couple of ‘em think he didn’t do near enough before we got pitched out or after. They thought we should all have a pension and a letter of recommendation. But no one could do anything for us. We were military pariah.” He rubbed a thumb along his jaw line. “Besides, it would be a lost cause, trying to get anything out of Iniquus’s Headquarters.”
“Could you explain that, sir?”
General Coleridge spread his arms. “Why would a man come here to live? You might ask yourself.”
Truth be told, that’s exactly what I had asked myself. I mean, if he ran out of milk, it was a two-hour haul to the nearest gas station to get gas for another forty-five minutes of driving to the nearest town with a grocery store.
“I want to keep my private life private. I don’t want looky-loos, wannabes, or influencers messing with me. The distance keeps the wannabes away. In order to keep out the remote viewers and the influencers, this place does its job, too. On this land, there was a terrible battle between warring native tribes. The number of lives lost by men, women, and children was just atrocious. It leaves an imprint, forever. So if someone were to task a remote viewer with ‘go check on General Coleridge,’ their awareness would land here, and they’d look for something of significance. What they’d pick up on was the energy imprint of the battle. I know this for a fact. I sent my wife, Emma, out here to sit in different locations in the field, and I tried to see what geometric shapes she held up, using remote viewing—and I’m considered a grandmaster, the big poohbah of this shit—I got nothing from her.”
My brow wrinkled. This was a confusing piece of information. I looked over at Spyder and all I got was a placid expression with a mild amount of interest showing at the corners of his eyes.
“It’s called doorknobbing. Russians did it, Chinese. . . they built their offices next to fairs and circuses, they had their offices on the bottom levels and brothels on the top. Now that was damned distracting.” He chuckled under his breath and ground the heel of his boot into the dirt. “Yup, anything that is emotion-filled, shiny, or action-packed is a distraction. The way it got the name doorknobbing came from this one time when I was sent to gather information. I thought these would be the most precise observations of my life. I was on it; I mean, really on it. I could tell you every last facet and shape; I could draw it with precision. When I came back, I realized I had spent two hours drawing a damned glass doorknob and missed the whole meeting. Guys got a kick out of teasing me over that one. Hence, doorknobbing.”
“Can art work that way?”