All Systems Normal

Okay, so maybe that last entry was a little melodramatic.

Yes, my body was covered in a substance that the scientific community has yet to comprehend. Yes, the bunker has been sealed off from the outside world for the last six or seven days. And yes indeed, everything BP9 was working on was destroyed in the accident.

But honestly, I haven’t been that upset about it. Usually I’m a fairly passionate guy – witness several of the former blog entries – but since the explosion, I’ve been quite the mellow yellow. You know how it is when you’ve been sweating all day, and you get that layer of dried salt all over your body? Then you take a shower, and it feels so good to scrub off the caked-on grime? I feel like that, but with bad vibes instead of sweat.

It’s like my personality’s been dry-cleaned or something. Every time I start to think about the drawbacks of our situation, the fact that we’ll probably die, and even that my current outlook is probably the result of some as-yet-unidentified dark energy tumor, a little thought pops into my head – On the universal scale, this ain’t a big deal.

You guys know I don’t hold too much truck with hippie meditation crap. But this feeling? It’s pretty friggin’ awesome.

Let me step back a bit. After the explosion, Plankton and the other labcoats spent a few days taking various samples from my body and analyzing them down to the particle level. When they were forced to admit that I hadn’t been contaminated in any way they could see, they let me out of quarantine to see what had happened.

The main lab was a wreck. The wormhole entryway had completely vanished in the accident, and the exit door was in pretty bad shape. Claire had been completely shielded from the dark energy by Yours Truly, but Gus had not only taken some to the face, but both of his legs had been severed just below the knee. He’s still in a coma as I write this.

The bunker locked down automatically, and standard Area 51 procedure is that it stays that way for at least 30 days. We have plenty of food, water, and air, and inspecting every square inch of the bunker for contaminants will certainly keep us all busy for the next three weeks. So far, it seems like there are no major toxic situations for us to worry about.

However, I have noticed some weird messes cropping up in the last couple days. Three puddles of goo, to be exact, about six to eight inches in diameter, all in dark, secluded corners.

Now I’ve seen (and cleaned) my share of bizarre crap during the last two plus years at Homey Airport. I’ve come across plasma spills that have eaten through three feet of steel, I’ve vacuumed up fog banks of toxic gas, I’ve even subdued a batch of sentient, ambulatory orange goo.

But the puddles I’ve been seeing are different from all of that. For starters, they don’t smell bad. Usually the first warning sign of something funky comes through the nose, whether it’s dog poo, fridge mold, or Grandma’s il-conceived attempt at Salisbury Steak. This stuff actually attracted me to it with a pleasant (if incongruous) mixture of lavender and baked bread.

It also has the consistency of a medium hold hair gel. Semi-difficult to clean up, but not intolerable. And the more I move it, the more pleasant odor it releases. Color-wise, it appears clear, but as you move it around, you can see that it catches the light and reflects it back in rainbow colors, kind of like the shimmer of an oil slick in water.

The first couple times, I simply mopped it up, enjoying the scent and assuming one of the scientists had spilled their top-secret hair products. But the third time, I noticed something really cool.

I was wiping off the counters toward the back of Research Room #2, trying to get caught up on some cleaning while everyone was asleep. Again, I noticed how pleasureable it was to occupy my hands, and how the work didn’t irritate me like it used to. That lavendery/bread smell reached my nose, and I found another puddle of the shimmery gel substance in the corner.

Instead of immediately going for the hand-vaporator, though, I dipped a latex-covered finger into the substance. I lifted it closer to inspect the stuff, and saw my fingertip had disappeared.

Before the accident, this might have made me freak out. But with my new mellow mantra running through my head, I chose instead to prod my seemingly missing digit. It was indeed still there, covered evenly by the fragrant gel. As I poked the stuff, my finger shimmered underneath, and I realized whatever this was, it was bending the light around it.

Whatever these puddles were made of, they effectively worked an invisibility lotion. Weird, but certainly not outside the bounds of all the other hinky shit I’ve seen down here. So I scooped a little into a sample jar, vacuumed up the rest, and resolved to mention it off-handedly at breakfast the next day.

But when I casually asked if the invisibility project was also going to be set back by the accident, the other labcoats at the table looked at me like I was nuts. Not only is there no invisibility project connected to BP9, but as far as I’ve been able to find, there’s nothing like it anywhere at Dreamland. Which raises one pretty big question:

Where the hell is this stuff coming from?