Cast of Characters

It’s been a crazy week.

Where do I start? Right after finding out I was transferred to Black Project 9, some suits pulled me off my shift, and immediately started briefing me on the responsibilities and whatnot of my new job. And friends, if you thought working at regular Area 51 was a hassle, you should see the hoops we have to jump through once you’re on a black project.

Background checks, lie detectors, tox screens, more background checks, equipment protocol lectures, quizzes on emergency procedures, and just to top things off, another background check. I even had a measuring session for a crisp new uniform (though sadly, not at the hands of Doc Hotness).

After four days of this, I was finally taken to Bunker 9 to meet the team. One thing you have to understand about the facilities at Groom Lake – they’re mostly underground. All those buildings you’ve seen in the satellite photos are mostly storage. The real action’s underneath them, and the deeper the facilities, the more dangerous the project.

So I was both excited and concerned when the elevator to my new workplace went down 20 stories into the earth. That’s almost half a mile, people. And that means Yours Truly is now hooked up with some serious shit.

But more on that later. We finally reached the BP9 facility, and I was given the five-cent tour. All black project bunkers are fully self-sustaining, with plenty of food, power, water, and air to last at least 18 months. This is both in case some other mishap occurs at Dreamland (see the previous “orange goop” incident), and if your own lab needs to be locked down.

As learned in my four-day orientation, “lockdown” occurs when there’s any kind of breach in your project. Because the work black project folks do is so secretive and weird, the system is set up to minimize the spread of material, be it information or a flesh-eating chemical gas. Once a lab is locked down, you don’t get out until a) the brass agrees to let you out, or b) everyone’s dead.

With this cheery thought in mind, I was quickly shown the dorms, kitchen, and rec area (complete with private gym), then taken to the main labs of BP9 to meet the staff.

I’ve been told black project teams are a lot like families. You may not have anything in common, but your welfare depends on the health and success of everyone around you. Everyone has a role, and by the end of it, you all want to kill each other.

So keeping the family metaphor in mind, here’s who I’ll be working with for the next 6 to 14 months. NOTE: names have been changed to avoid the NSA hunting me down.

PROFESSOR PLANKTON (50s): Head scientist of BP9, and the mother figure of the team. This project’s his baby, and he’s already put more hours into it than we ever will. Despite the usual distracted egghead personality streak, he seems like a mellow dude. Which is in stark contrast to …

GENERAL HARD-ASS (60s): If Plankton’s mommy, this dude is the sternest, most no-nonsense dad since Darth Vader. Let’s not forget, this is a military installation, so he makes the rules. And trust me, they’re stricter than a Catholic nun. Put it this way: Hard-Ass is the kind of guy who picks his teeth with a Bowie knife instead of a toothpick.

DOC HOTNESS (30s, but could pass for 25): The smart but quirky sister with a heart of gold. She’s got the looks of Zooey Deschanel, the brains of Diane Keaton circa Annie Hall, and the sense of humor of Tina Fey, all merged into one sexy scientist package. I know. God was just showing off when he made her.

PHILDO THE DILDO (20s): The cynical jerk-ass brother figure. Because he keeps the computers working, which in turn keeps us breathing, this dillwad thinks he can be as big a douche as he wants and pretty much get away with it. Which – surprise – he tends to do. Daily.

JOE THE JANITOR (32, me): The black sheep of the family. A plucky young idealist, the only one who really knows what’s up, and a fighting against insurmountable odds to be with the woman of his dreams. Think a more attractive Leonardo DiCaprio. (Okay, so I’m painting a rosy picture of myself. You don’t like it, get your own blog.)

AND THE REST: There are about four other scientists and a half-dozen stone-faced soldiers lurking around. If they become interesting or important, I’ll introduce them later.

But right now, it’s late. I’ll fill you in on the day-to-day next time.

Attack of the Orange Goop

You ever play with one of those old-fashioned ball-on-a-stick things when you were a kid? There’d be a wooden ball with a hole, and the goal was to catch it on the stick. Not as exciting as Grand Theft Auto, I know, but for a couple months there, I was obsessed with it.

See, whenever I tried to catch the ball, it never worked. I’d focus on the point of that damn stick like a laser beam, and the ball would always bounce off or wobble to the side or miss it altogether. But the second I stopped paying attention? BAM! The little round bastard would slide home like Hank Aaron.

The same was true this past week. I spent seven, brain-sweaty days trying to come up with a way to impress Hotness, and right when I was about to give up – BAM! Dumb luck steps in and solves everything.

It went down like this: I was in the cafeteria, sketching out a way to start a fire that would get the attention of Hotness and the rest of her Black Project 9 crew, then let her see me put it out, when a contamination alarm started blaring.

You should know: there are as many alarms at Area 51 as there are ways to get yourself killed. To make things even more helpful/scary, each type of alarm has a different sound based on whatever the threat is. Fire is an old-fashioned school bell, munitions tests elicit a wailing, crying baby noise, and security breaches cause a wah-wah, European ambulance sound.

But contamination alarms are the worst. There are detection devices all over Dreamland, and whenever they pick up on a foreign, potentially harmful substance, not only does the building get sealed, but these annoying blue strobe lights kick on, and the contamination alarm starts screaming.

And when I say “screaming,” I’m talking eardrum-rupturing, brain-bleeding, stick-a-knitting-needle-in-your-corneas sonic pain. The simple volume of this shit is enough to rattle the fillings out of your teeth.

So I’m in the cafeteria when this fucking sharp-fanged auditory demon of an alarm kicks on. There’s a couple lab coats in line trying to decide between Mexican pizza and grinders, and the blaring is enough to make them curl up on the floor and piss their pants. Other people are running for various emergency exits, which of course have been sealed shut.

But for some reason, I remained pretty calm. I scanned the room for possible culprits, and quickly spotted a low-level research assistant whose arm was covered in a writhing, fluorescent-orange substance. There was an open thermos next to him, so it looked like Mr. Mensa had mistakenly brought his latest biological weapon to the caff instead of his tomato soup. I’m telling you, these nerds might have gone to M.I.T., but that does not make ‘em smart.

Mensa whacked away at his arm with a lunch tray, and the orange shit leaped away, sticking to the back of another lab coat. I guess the slime had teeth or something, cause that guy started squealing like a pig on Easter Sunday. He clawed at it, but the orange goop dropped to the floor and disappeared.

Evidently, this was some kind of self-camouflaging vicious slime. You gotta hand to the military, they have a pretty good imagination when it comes to inventing scary weapons shit.

The no-longer-orange slime leap-frogged through the room, taking little chunks out of random people, and I could see it was clearly headed for the exit. The building might have been locked down, but if this stuff had camouflage, I was betting it could ooze its way through door cracks, too.

So I grabbed a snowball of mashed potatoes from the caff line, and nailed the back of the slime with a killer fastball. Now at least I could see the stuff. But it must not have liked starch, because the goop about-faced from the exit and started leap-frogging toward me. And while it lacked a face, the shit definitely looked pissed.

I didn’t even have time to think. The orange crap leapt for my face, nano-fangs extended, and I scooped a bottle of ketchup from the table, squirting the psycho slime with eight ounces of Hamburger Helper.

They told me later it was the sugar that did it, but as soon as the ketchup hit the crud, it curled in on itself, shook like James Brown, and went to the big Primordial Soup Tureen in the sky.

The annoying blue strobes went off, and I glanced across the room to see Hotness staring right at me. I’ll admit, I got a little carried away by the moment, and lifted the ketchup bottle to my lips for a bad-ass, take-that blow on the barrel. She giggled, but just as I was about to capitalize on the moment, the Haz-Mat jerk-offs came storming in to sequester us all for a nine-hour battery of decontaminating showers.

But I’m pretty confident that I’ve got an in with her now. All I have to do is have four or five well-executed conversations, then --

HOLY SHIT. Just got an email memo from the top brass. It turns out that because of my “clear-headed response” in the caff and “the recommendation of several witnesses,” I’m being transferred to a new janitorial position.

Ladies and gentlemen, you’re looking at the sole clean-up guy for:

Black.

Project.

NINE!!!

Dating While Classified

Dating at Area 51 is kind of weird.

Besides the whole “office romance” angle, you’ve got to deal with the “summer camp” factor (relationships based on proximity instead of mutual interests), the “collateral damage” factor (you don’t want to get in the sack with someone and find out – whoops! A gene sequencer mishap gave them extra genitals), and most importantly, what I call the “noble/serf” factor.

Because there are only 2000 employees at Dreamland, everyone is broken into small and very hierarchical sub-groups. It’s not just Aircraft versus Weapons Systems; folks are divided by which section they work for, then which level they’re at within that section, then by IQ. So while working for Wormhole Research is cooler than Nano-Computing, a Nano project lead has way more cache than a Wormhole research assistant.

To make things worse, the whole place is divided into Scientists V. Maintenance, and guess which one is ranked lower? Yeah – I’m stuck at one of the only joints in the country where a 90-pound nerd gets more respect than some bruiser who can bench 220.

Because of this, it’s pretty unheard of for anyone from the blue-collar crowd to date a lab coat. It’s frowned upon for us worker bees to even talk to the intellectual elite. In fact, in my two years here, I’ve never seen anyone exchange more than a few sentences with the eggheads. If they spill some shit, we’re called to clean it up, and the relationship ends there.

So there are a few teensy obstacles when a janitor like me gets a crush on a scientist in, wait for it – Black Project 9. For all the crazy projects you see on the shift schedule (Dimensional Physics, Dark Matter Research, and Extra-terrestrial Communication are just some of the highlights), there are 13 “Black Projects,” which even those of us with top-secret security clearance don’t get to know about. And yes, the people who work on those are cooler than Ferris Bueller, while the rest of us are like Chunk from The Goonies.

And of course, the first thing I found out about Hotness is that she’s working on a black project. That makes it tough to even see her, much less try to ask her out. But I’m a new man and shit, so I refused to be deterred. Even the black project folks have to hit the cafeteria, so I staked myself in one corner, mopping and re-mopping the same puddle of Mountain Dew until I saw her walk in.

The first day, I was too frozen to say anything. The second and third day, she was with some other lab coats from her division. But the fourth day, my friends -- the fourth day, I manned up and sat at the other end of her table, lunch tray in hand. (Thankfully, it wasn’t meat loaf day – I heard they sell the leftovers of that as moon rocks).

Here’s a recreation of our earth-shattering conversation, with inner commentary:

ME: Chimichangas, huh?

(God. I need to work on my openings.)

HER: Yeah, well – they were out of Agent Orange.

(Holy crap. Hot AND funny? I gotta step up my game here.)

ME: At least it wasn’t the meat loaf. I heard they carve that out of rocks and sell it on the moon.

(God dammit! Why can’t I ever remember the punchlines to jokes?!)

HER: What?

(Maybe if I change the topic, she won’t notice my stupidity?)

ME: So you just started here?

HER: Yup. Any inside dirt I should know?

ME: Don’t bring in an iPod unless you want a body cavity search.

(Jesus. Am I trying to convince this chick I’m a psycho?)

HER: Good to know. I like to get wild on Fridays.

(Did she just give me an opening? I was happy not to get smacked.)

ME: Um, I was wondering. There’s a screening of The Day the Earth Stood Still at the Crystal Springs drive-in this weekend, and if you’re not on rotation –

(Suddenly appearing out of nowhere --)

PHILDO THE DILDO: Hotness! There’s some kind of (insert dick-swinging techno-babble obviously trying impress her), and we need your expertise.

HER: Okay. (To me.) Enjoy the rest of your lunch.

Then she was gone, my nimrod IT nemesis actually turning back to give me a “That’s right, sucka” smirk. So I’ve clearly got to take things to the next level here. I have to do something that will get Hotness to notice me, something that will prove I’m not just a regular janitor. I need to do something that will BLOW HER MIND.

And I have no idea what that is.

Origin Story, Part Two

The first thing that gets to you about this place is the paperwork.

Forget about the multiple background checks, drug testing, and battery of inoculations I had to go through – it was the frigging paperwork that pissed me off. Once I was cleared for employment, I spent the first week reading and filling out paperwork.

And I’m not talking like a regular work week, I’m talking seven business days. Eight straight hours. Sitting in some windowless over-air-conditioned room, reading text the size of a midget’s pecker and having to initial every. Freaking. Page. By the time I hit Day Six, I was worried I’d have to immediately go on disability because I was going BLIND.

But I got through it with my eyesight relatively intact. I started my illustrious job as an Area 51 janitor, only to discover the paperwork had just begun. Every day, my email inbox was filled with at least 200 new memos, missives, and addendums to stuff that had gone out on previous days. There were updates on security protocols. Suggestions on dealing with bacterial contamination. Even stupid sermons about appropriate workplace behavior.

It would be one thing if you could just blow it off. But if you weren’t up-to-date on the latest directives, your butt would be barbecue before you could say “bubonic plague.” Example: you suit up for a chemical spill, but it turns out the substance has been re-synthesized the night before to eat through reinforced rubber, so you’re on the ground with your bones melting like ice cream, the only condolence you get is: “Didn’t you read the memo?”

So I developed a photographic memory. I’d take a mental snapshot of the latest blabbering email, then scan it for any words that applied to me. “Radioactive,” “flesh-eating,” and “overtime” were always sure signs that my next clean-up would be a little hairy.

After the first couple months, though, I started to get a handle on life at Groom Lake. When there wasn’t some kind of accident or spill, most of my job consisted of keeping the labs tidy. Which, as those of you with scientists in the family will know, was a major freaking job. Not only are these eggheads filthy, but man, they’re forgetful. They’ll knock over a can of Coke, then get all excited about the latest E. Coli orgy and completely forget about the puddle of soda. So by the time Yours Truly shows up, it’s a sticky mass of immovable ass-jizz. One of the only upsides about being a janitor here is that I have access to cleaning products that could take the stains off a skeleton in a tar pit.

In fact, I’d pretty much given up on anything interesting happening in this joint until this morning. I was just finishing a six-day rotation, when I saw a new scientist (let’s call her Doc Hotness) enter the locker room. Unlike the other eggheads, this chick knew how to rock a lab coat. She was like every sexy librarian fantasy you’ve ever had poured into one curvy-creamy package, with cute glasses. She only had to tie her curly hair back in a ponytail, and I was at full attention.

There’s only 2000 or so people who work Homey Airport, so a new arrival is like chum in the water. But before I could even introduce myself to the hot doc, this douchebag IT guy I call Phildo the Dildo gets in her grill and is all, “I’ll give you the tour (slobber, slobber).”

So I’m totally cock-blocked. And the old Joe, he would have just sat back and eaten a full helping of pussy pudding. But no more. I’ve been here almost two years, and I’m sick of crying on the sidelines. It’s time for this QB to get in the game and fuck some shit UP.

So here’s the deal: Hotness and I are working the same rotation five days from now. I am going to finally take charge of my life, get off my ass, and make something happen. I’m gonna grab hold of my balls, and use ‘em for what the Good Lord intended:

I am going to ask out Doc Hotness.