Security_in_the_Desert
What you see in the cactus when you're barely looking
Author’s Note: Area <51> is a myth. In contrast, this story is reported f<a>k_t.
The first thing they told us was not to ask questions. The second was to keep silent on what happened in the gymnazium. This was during orientation. Only they called it the basics. Sometimes we heard that as ba<6>. Orientation lasted a week, and then work in-full started.
We ran it in shifts. Two of us in the front and two stationed in the back. Two more rode low around the perimeter all night. ATVs were provided for this, tweaked in design to move in total silence and use on-screen radar rather than the lights at the front of the vehicle.
That session it was me and Beezy on the perimeter, gliding in our vehicle like chariots across the dark face of the desert.
Outside lighting was prohibited and our nocturnal illumination came solely from the stars and moon above the site. This was purposeful. We received our orders and didn’t ask. It’s the way of a good rider to keep still and small, just bump along with the movement. To feel it in the big shakes of our planet, but also, much nicer, in the smaller rolls of wheels in the night.
During the day, others scoped the perimeter, but I preferred Beezy’s and mine, when the sun was down, during our planet’s late time, which we felt occasionally as L<8>.
Directives and instruction came from the office in the complex that none of us had seen in the form of printed out papers. CLASSIFIED was inked hard across the top and DISCARD IN PRIVATE at the bottom. These were found taped to our vehicles at the start of our shift. That was the extent of our communication with our highers. Complete and totally one-sided, but the rate of the pay and the steadiness of the work was generous enough to mute even the flappiest of mouths.
Beezy and me, riding low those long nights, somehow feeling totally far-seeing, like we were standing still on the front porch of our planet, always open, looking at the stars and orbs that whooshed millennia away from our welcome mat.
Course I never said it like that to Beezy. Another one of the low parts of the job, or maybe it’s just my human way of being, is that you can never really say what you’re feeling as good as you can feel it. And even when you can, it’s just words and they rarely fire as free-like and fully as the synapses and bursts and electric charges of inarticulated and unexpressed brain function.
Still, those dark nights of riding.
Clusters of cacti appeared on the edge of our loop, none of them found in the same spot the next night. Sometimes it felt poisoned, but mostly it was antiseptic and benign. Benign. A word for a feeling we occasionally felt as be<9>.
Apologies, some words turn into numbers out here.
<88>
Other than that, it was run-of-the-mill security work. We were outfitted with standard-issue bodycams that we turned in at the end of every ride, and spent most of our time logging the cacti, which were always shifting. Sometimes we encountered a hawk or a den of rattlers, which we were instructed to mark down, but non-plant life was sparse and far-between.
The cacti were a particular gnarl of trouble. One night, you might log a cluster under a rock shelf, crouched low and spread out in reflection of the outjut of sandstone above it, and then the following night it was rearranged enough to make your memory suspect. And sometimes not there at all. It made you face yourself and your own mind since there were no pictures, what with all non-issued technology strictly prohibited.
Beezy called them the posers, not as an insult, but a description, because they did just that, held a pose, always caught mid-gesture the way figures in certain paintings are when the artist, their God, turns away. A real Toy Story situation. We logged them all. Wrote down coordinates and rough creative descriptions like “squatting shortly”, or “with elbows thrust up,” or “getting froggy and ready to fight.” There was one we called the senator, who stood wide and authoritative near the eastern ridge with an “arm” thrust in front him like he demanded attention, he was about to say something important. He never spoke, at least not on our shifts.
Beezy and me were companionable in the best silent way, two watchers side by side, moving in their own box while sitting still.
The few times we did talk, and I mean good and at length and about things not of the cacti, we discussed what we saw that night in the gymnazium. All of us saw it, must have been forty people. A plant moving in three short bursts. Not stepping, but moving through space. Disappearing and returning. No other way of talking about it. The red-shirts brought us into a low-ceilinged auditorium and showed us the cactus. We stared. Nothing. We stared more. Nothing still. We kept at it. And then the cactus moved, big wide steps forging forward through space unseen. There and then gone. Three steps forward. No explanation, not even an explan<8>tion, nothing other than what we came up with in the silence of our time.
Nights on the desert were long, and they were often strange. This was out past the fence, the site of the there-not-theres, if you know what I mean, and if you read between the lines I think you’ll know that I do.
At the end of the shifts, we would leave our handwritten notes taped to the vehicle. Just like the directives we received. This was how they delivered information, only sometimes I heard it as in<4>mation. And sometimes even in<4>m<8>tion.
Chalk it up to one of the many zags of living in the shade of the visitor.
The second-to-last night I was on shift, it was with Beezy, my regular. It was also the last night I ever saw him. To start, we zigged the far loop. Nothing off the regular, which gave us the quiet freedom to let our thoughts rise and do the impossible work of filling up the vastness of space before us, so we could really see them and ourselves in total consideration. We saw a few strange cacti, marked them down and kept going.
And on the left side of the lower loop, we saw something, my first sighting of something truly unusual. In the <4>ground was an odd sight. One that pierces and holds you down, tied in tether to the spot you’re on.
A silhouette in the distance, stepping away from the fence and buildings of the complex, low and squat and ugly, that we never approached since our one visit for orientation.
At first it looked like a cactus, but it was moving, very slowly, and as we neared, and the stars shone on a bright patch, clearing our sight, we saw it was a form of a person. A person dressed in an astronaut suit.
Which was odd, especially with its straining slow movement away from the complex, toward the vast spread of desert past us that eventually led to civilization.
We watched the astronaut move forward as we neared, taking staggered steps. When we were maybe twenty feet out, it dropped to its knees and keeled over. Stopped moving. I called it in on the radio, the first time I ever dialed 6X2. The line burped and a voice spoke through. I described what we saw.
<Is your partner there?> The voice buzzed electric.
Beezy threw me a look. I waited for his nod before responding that he was.
The voice buzzed again <Tell him to approach. You stay put. Finger on the button.>
Again, I waited for direction from Beezy. He shrugged his shoulders and nodded. Started to climb off the vehicle. I announced it affirmative to 6X2 and described my partner’s movements.
Beezy went out to check the astronaut out. The cacti behind him waved high and dinosauric in the night. It was a marvel to behold, if I’m calling it str8.
As he neared, the voice on the radio abruptly told me to hush and disconnect the line. I did as I was told.
And in silence, I saw Beezy’s final approach, the astronaut lying facedown on the ground. He bent over the suit, talking, saying something I couldn’t make out, and waited for a moment, as if expecting a response. The suit gave a small shudder, and Beezy stood up, very straight and tall, very clearly a man, but just for a moment, because in the next one he wasn’t a man, he was just numbers, and then he was gone. I looked down. So was the astronaut suit. The land was bare before me, completely scorched of any presence other than the faraway cut plants.
It was one of the widest views from the great porch I’d ever had, and then it was over. They were both gone, never there, forever missing, and I was on the radio, punching in 6X2 again and again. They told me to return to the lodging spot, where Beezy and I parked our vehicles nightly, and so I did. I was let off early.
The next evening, I arrived at my vehicle at the regular time and encountered the following message taped to it.
CLASSIFIED
Employee #4540-B,
Your assignment has been held firm, although your partner has been changed.
He never was. We appreciate your discretion in this matter.
DISCARD IN PRIVATE
I left the job that night. But I still carry with me what I’ve seen.
What people don’t know is that <51> is not a number. It’s a person spoken into a word that becomes a value and then a shape and then nothing.
<88>