Why I Hate Ventriloquists

You ever start reminisce about something with your friends, and none of them knows what you’re talking about? You go over all the little details, confident they were right there with you, and then you realize what you thought was a memory was actually a dream?

I had an experience like that the other day, but in reverse.

Ever since Claire and I rescued Gus from the imploding teleporter, it’s been a bit easier for us to hang out. Our schedules don’t match up a lot, but when we do have breaks at the same time, we usually try to eat together. We’ve had a few meals together at this point, and have gotten pretty comfortable talking to each other.

(And I don’t know if this is some kind of PTSD, “new appreciation for life” thing I’ve gained since the accident, but I haven’t been as focused on trying to take things to the next level with her. Right now, it’s cool just hanging out.

(Okay, that and I’m still not sure if she knows I tried to kiss her. And I’m sure as shinola not about to broach that topic just yet.))

So a couple days ago. Claire and I are sitting in the caff, splitting a just-add-water Jumbo Pak of Thai Garlic Noodles for dinner. (Not bad, BTW – check your local Army/Navy Surplus store.)

“Does this lockdown bother you at all?” She suddenly asked, looking at me over her chopsticks.

“Not really,” I said. “I guess it should, huh? Essentially being trapped a half-mile underground … knowing they might turn off the power any second … your life hanging by a thread.”

“Just like Christmas with the family,” she smirked. “But it’s weird, I feel the same way. Like it doesn’t matter if I HUNGRY HUNGRY SO SO HUNGRY.”

I blinked. That was weird. “Here,” I said, pushing the noodles toward her. “I had a big breakfast.”

“Thanks.” She slurped from the bowl. “It’s not like I don’t care if we all die. I just have this feeling that everything SHINY RING? NO! HUNGRY! BAD FOOD HERE!”

“Okay,” I said. “You want me to make something else?”

She frowned. “Why? You don’t like these?”

“No, you don’t like them.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You just said in a caveman voice you didn’t like them!”

“No, I didn’t.” She frowned. “Caveman voice?”

“You said you were hungry, so I gave you the noodles, then you said –“

“ALL BAD. HIDE NOW. FIND FOOD IN DARK TIME.”

“There!” I shouted. “Right there. You said you had to hide!”

“Joe,” Claire replied carefully. “I didn’t say anything.”

I looked around, confirming we were the only ones in the cafeteria. I didn’t have a walkie on me, my Blackberry was turned off, and the comm system –

“Fucking Phildo,” I cursed, going over to the voice panel that was placed near the door of every room in the BP9 bunker. I clicked off the comm connection, confident he wouldn’t be able to prank me again.

I turned back to Claire. “Let’s see him screw with me n—“

“OW! BAD FEELING! BAD BAD BUTT FEELING!”

I had been staring right at Claire when the voice boomed out. And her mouth had been shut tighter than a drum of toxic waster.

“Um,” I began. “You wouldn’t happen to be a ventriloquist, by any chance?”

While she chewed on that one, the voice boomed again. “BAD BUTT BURNING! LAVA PAIN! ANUS FIRE SPRAYING FROM – OHHHHHHHHHHHH.”

“Joe?” I blinked, realizing Claire was jiggling my shoulder. I didn’t remember her walking across the room. “You totally zoned – BETTER NOW. SLEEP UNTIL DARK TIME.”

“You know what?” I said. “I think I need some sleep. I am feeling a little weird.”

“Good idea,” she said, looking concerned. “And if it persists, we’ll have you see Plankton.”

“Great idea. Top notch. Enjoy the rest of your – YES. SLEEP UNDER SHINY RING. You really didn’t hear that just now?” I asked desperately.

“Hear what?” she replied.

“Nothing. Good night.” And I fled back to my room.

Maybe it is post-traumatic stress from the accident. At least, that’s what I’m trying to tell myself. I’m trying because if that’s not the case, then I have to accept the alternative:

Something must have happened to me during the accident.

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?

Human Error

I don’t have a lot of time to post this.

There’s been a bad accident, really bad, and the whole bunker’s been placed on lockdown. There’s no getting in or out, and I may not even be able to send emails soon, so I need to get all this down in case I don’t make it out of here.

Okay. Calming breath. Let me back up and explain.

Like I said last time, we’d proved teleportation could work. After a week of checking Arthur’s remains for abnormalities (there weren’t any), the labcoats sent about 20 more small mammals through the teleportation wormhole, and they all came through fine.

So this morning, they decided it was time to move on to humans. I guess usually they’d usually do a few thousand more tests before making that leap, but the top brass has been threatening to shut down the whole project, so Plankton decided he needed some definitive results.

The soldiers drew straws, and three of them were selected to go through the teleporter: let’s call them Wilbur, Neil, and Gus. They all put on a more streamlined version of spacesuit, complete with air supply, video recorders, and a couple defensive weapons. (In case of what, I don’t know, but it’s the military. They need their guns.)

All three were strapped into the seats, and Plankton started up the teleporter. The wormhole appeared just like it had for the last week, and the army guys were sucked inside the funnel, disappearing.

That’s when everything went to hell. The second wormhole appeared, but when the seats shot out, they were empty. A whole minute passed. Still nothing. General Hard-Ass suggested sending a camera in, but just as he and Plankton started to argue over the merits of this, an explosion ripped out of the second wormhole.

It wasn’t your classic, Hollywood-action fireball, either. It appeared to be made of translucent green plasma, coating the lab equipment. Directly following that, one of the soldiers appeared out of the wormhole: Gus.

His face was streaked with Mountain Dew-colored plasma, and his suit looked like it had been through the Hundred Years’ War. He was pulling himself out of the wormhole by his hands, when his lower end appeared to catch on something. He screamed.

Claire was the first one to react. She ran out of the control room, not even bothering to put on a contamination suit. When I saw she was going to help Gus, I ran down after her.

Gus was scrabbling at the ground, eyes horse-wild behind his slime-covered visor. Claire and I pulled on his arms, but whatever had his other end wasn’t letting go. A hulking shape started to appear in the dim murk of the wormhole.

“Hold on to him!” I yelled, and grabbed a fire axe off the wall. The thing was in the wormhole was getting closer. I still couldn’t see what it was, but I sure as shit didn’t want to find out.

I brought the axe down on the dark energy supply hose.

Time and gravity seemed to suspend for a long moment. As the axe split the hose, a purply-black substance floated into the room, cascading over my chest, causing everything it touched to float lazily into the air. It was actually a pretty peaceful, if you took away the whole “abandoning the laws of physics” terror that latched on to my brain.

I looked around, seeing Claire almost had Gus’ entire body through the wormhole. Only his legs were still inside, just below the knee. I wondered briefly why they had chosen to make the teleporter suits that exact shade of grey, and then the contamination mechanism kicked on.

The dark energy was sucked from the room, everything around me crashed to the ground, and without the power to sustain it, the teleporter folded in on itself, crushed within the first wormhole. The second wormhole closed too, neatly severing Gus’ legs.

There was a second explosion, this one completely silent. A ring of blue energy shot through the room, and as it passed through me, the lab, the people, even the machines seemed to break into their primal components and be spread out along an infinite spectrum. Maybe it was the shock, but for a second I thought I could see everything at once – the individual hairs on Claire’s head, the cloven marrow in Gus’ leg bones, the rivets in the screws of one of the seats.

Then everything snapped back into place, skin upon muscle upon bone, and I locked eyes with Claire. She looked just as shocked as I felt.

“You’re so pretty,” I blurted, then blacked out.

And I woke up here, in the sick bay. No idea how long I’ve been out or even if I’m still alive in the traditional sense. Thankfully, they left my phone in my pocket, so I was able to get all this –

I can hear them at the door. This may be the last thing I write. If it is, make sure my story gets out. Don’t let them cover this up. Tell everyone –

One Small Step For Hamsters

They’ve done it.

It's been a week of nearly round-the-clock tests, failures, and really messy clean-ups by Your Humble Narrator, but Black Project 9 has successfully teleported a hamster named Arthur.

After my near-miss kiss with Doc Hotness -- sorry, Claire – she threw herself back into her work, doing calculations for nearly two days straight. At the end of it, it only took them imploding a dozen or so small mammals before they worked out the kinks.

And at 9:15 PM last night, they teleported Arthur. He’s a cute little guy with tan and white spots, and I was already envisioning sponging his adorable fur into a bucket when this test failed.

Claire placed him gently in a little car seat thingy with a harness, and turned on the teleporter. (I think they’d realized I knew what was going on, so I was allowed to watch.) The teleporter itself is a metal cylinder about 15 feet wide and 20 yards long. It’s wrapped in power cables and ends in a six-foot-thick titanium plate. The labcoats have nicknamed the plate “Splat City,” because when a test doesn’t work, that’s where the subject ends up in a Jackson Pollock-esque puddle of gore.

Again, I’m fuzzy on the details, but the general idea is the cylinder opens a wormhole in the titanium plate, the subject steps through, and comes out the terminus of the wormhole on the opposite side of the room.

That’s if it works. When the calculations are a teensy hair off, the subject is simply sucked into the event horizon, turned inside out, and flattened at a sub-atomic level. It’s a hell of a diet, but you won’t look very good in a bathing suit.

I’m sure all this was going through Claire’s head as she strapped little Arthur to his car seat. But she came back into the control room looking very professional, and ordered the team to power up the machine.

The cylinder started to spin, drawing power from the dark matter reservoirs on the other side of the bunker. Within minutes, it was rotating like a nuclear-powered carnival ride. Arthur’s car seat was suspended in the middle by a gimble, and a monitor showed that he was pretty calm despite the incredible noise.

A black spiral appeared in the center of the titanium plate. The labcoats started to get excited. This had happened a couple times before, but it had never stabilized. This time, however, the spiral grew and grew.

Suddenly, the titanium plate was sucked down an endless funnel. The scientists all held their breath, and Plankton punched a button labeled “Release.”

Arthur’s car seat unhooked, and he rocketed down the metal cylinder, vanishing into the wormhole.

A millisecond went by. Then two. The silence was deafening, especially considering the teleporter was making an awful racket.

Then there was a huge flash of blue light, a deafening crack like thunder, and a second miniature wormhole opened across the testing room. Arthur’s car seat shot out of the funnel, was caught by a sling contraption, and with the reflexes of a much younger man, Professor Plankton killed the power.

The cylinder stopped turning and the wormholes vanished back into nothingness. Still, the labcoats held their breath. Arthur could look like a microwaved can of Spaghetti-O’s for all we knew.

“Claire,” the professor said, and she quickly made her way into the testing room to check the hamster.

“He’s okay!” she shouted, and the scientists erupted into cheers. Champagne corks popped, Fred and Barney kissed like high school kids, and even General Hard-Ass allowed himself a thin approximation of a grin.

Claire came back into the control room, cradling Arthur and beaming at me.

“Simplicity,” she breathed before being surrounded by the other labcoats.

And sure, the little tan-and-white furball’s insides are being dissected and probed as we speak, but he’ll always be remembered as the first living thing to travel 50 yards in two seconds. And I, the lowly janitor, was there to witness it.

Now the real fun begins. Once the tests are done and a couple more hamsters are sent through, BP9’s moving on to the main event:

They’re going to teleport a human.

Q & A

Things have been slow here the past week. And since some of you have been writing in with questions about Area 51, myself, and the general truthfulness of this blog, I thought I’d take a few moments and answer some of them. Here goes:

Do you really work at Area 51?

Yes.

Then how are you posting these things without getting caught?

As I’ve said before, all the names and some of the situations have been changed to maintain anonymity. But as an added protection, I’m not the one who actually posts the entries. The blog is set up and run by a friend of mine, who shall remain confidential in order to avoid a nice vacation to Guantanamo Bay. I send him emails with the postings in code, and he puts them on Blogger. There’s also a time lag of five to eight weeks from when the events actually take place, which keeps the brass from connecting the dots.

Hey d00d! alot of the crap you talk about seems liek bullshit. Explain yourself!

Like it says in the blog title, I’m a janitor, not a scientist. I fully admit that I don’t understand some of these bigger science-y concepts. I try to self-educate via the Internet, but if I get some of my facts/numbers/laws of the universe wrong, oh well. I chose playing “The Legend of Zelda” over doing well in Particle Physics 202.

If you can’t leave the bunker, what do you do for fun?

Well, none of us have that much free time. But when I do, I tend to work out, watch movies, or play games. The bunkers have a great on-demand video service, as well as the latest consoles. It was pretty surreal to play the “Area 51” game while sitting in a shielded bunker a half-mile underneath the real Area 51. Lately, I’ve been playing a lot of Wordscraper on Facebook.

How exactly do you write your blog entries?

There’s plenty of computers in the BP9 bunker (fun fact: Area 51 is entirely PC-based), but since all data is downloaded to central servers, I write most of the entries on my Blackberry. It’s still possible for the tech guys to intercept my outgoing emails, but it’s certainly safer than leaving copies lying around on a hard drive. I wrote a simple app for my phone that immediately converts my entries to look like boring regular emails.

Why are you doing this? Don’t you know you could be jailed without trial for like, the rest of your life if the government finds out?

First off, thanks for being concerned about my safety. But since my blog traffic isn’t quite equal yet to say, YouPorn, I think I’m still flying comfortably under the radar. And secondly, to answer the question, I was tired of living in a bubble. Even though I work with all this top-secret stuff, I don’t really get the chance to share it with anybody. I suppose I wanted to feel a bit more like a real person, like I was having an effect on someone, even if it’s only a couple folks in the Midwest.

So thanks for that. As for work, it’s been quiet. Doc Hotness/Claire has been working away at her new equations, and the scuttlebutt is that we may start up testing in a few days. Which hopefully won’t mean more exploding animals for me to clean up.

I’ll keep you posted.

Date-us Interruptus

Sorry about that. I needed a couple days to process the absurdly bad luck train-wreck that is my romantic life. Here’s what went down:

A couple nights ago, I was cleaning an animal transport cubby after another messy teleportation failure. I was finally starting to get the blood to come off, when Doc Hotness burst into the lab, tears in her eyes.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid!” She cursed, clearly not realizing I was in the back corner. “Why are you so dumb, you dumb, dumb-ass … DUMMY?!” She knocked a stack of computations to the floor. She was about to do the same with a rack of test tubes, when I cleared my throat.

“You’re welcome to throw all the paper you want. But glass is more of a pain to clean up.”

“Shit,” she said. “I didn’t know anyone was here. Sorry.” She scooped up the papers clumsily. “I should go. I have to … work.”

But instead, she sank to the floor, tears in her eyes.

“So it’s going good, huh?”

She laughed bitterly. “If our goal was to explode cute, furry creatures, I’d be a shoo-in for the Nobel Prize.”

I made my way to her side. “You know, I think there’s something to be said for working too hard. When was the last time you were up top?” She looked confused. “You know, on the surface? With the stars? Outside?”

“Oh. Two weeks, I guess. Maybe three?”

“Well, if you haven’t seen Orion’s Belt from the wing of a stealth jet, you haven’t really lived.”

That got a real laugh, and she agreed to take a walk around the airstrip with me. I snagged a bottle of wine from the fridge, met her at the elevator, and we went to the surface.

Area 51 is kind of bleak during the day, but at night, it’s downright pretty. There’s no blazing heat melting the skin off your bones, and the visibility of the stars is amazing.

Doc Hotness (whom I suppose we should now call Claire) and I strolled down the line of parked aircraft, looking up at the stars and taking slugs out of the wine bottle. The night sky was so clear, you could see the spiral arm of the Milky Way.

“I just thought I’d be better at this,” Claire told me. “My whole life, I’ve been able to count on my brain to solve things. If I don’t know the answer, I’ll find out. If I don’t understand, I’ll break it down into manageable chunks. But this … it’s just a complete ...”

“Clusterfuck?” I suggested.

“Exactly,” she laughed. “We’re implementing technology without knowing the full extent of what it can do, or even how it works.”

“What does Plankton say?” I asked, passing her the bottle.

“Oh, he’s too busy trying to keep the general from pulling the plug on the whole show. The military never thought this was a very viable plan, and if we don’t show some results soon, the whole project’ll be scrapped.”

“But BP9’s in one of the biggest labs at Dreamland. I thought we were a priority.”

“Yeah, right. They stuck us down there because they thought something was going to go wrong, and they wanted the option of sealing us off in case some idiot like me screwed the pooch.”

We climbed up on the wing of a dusty Blackbird Stealth, leaning back and looking up at the sky.

“My dad used to take me up in his planes,” I told her. “And once we’d get up high enough, all the stuff on the ground would become really simple. You know, a tree would become a green dot. A house would become a black square. And up there, it was easy to see where things were.

“Maybe that’s what you need to do,” I said, looking into her blue-grey eyes. “Step back from the problem a little bit. Simplify.”

We were staring at each other in that way where everything else drops out. The stars wheeled overhead. My heart pounded on my ribs like a landlord screaming for the rent. And I must’ve had a severe oxygen depletion in my brain, because I leaned in to kiss her.

Claire leapt to her feet. I toppled over, nearly breaking my nose on the wing of the plane.

“Simplicity!” she shouted, jumping up and down.

The metal wing underneath us creaked ominously. “You know, these might not be entirely up to code,” I informed her.

“Joe, you nailed it!” she yelled, whacking me on the shoulder. “I’ve been looking at the particle stabilization all wrong, trying to compensate for everything little thing. I just need to think globally!”

She hopped to the ground, tossing aside the bottle of wine and running back toward the BP9 hangar.

“It’s two in the morning!” I shouted after her.

“I know!” she crowed back. “Thanks!”

Then she was out of earshot, leaving me alone on the wing of the plane. Even though it was dark, anyone looking would have seen my face burning a bright shade of embarrassment red.

God, I hope she doesn’t realize I tried to kiss her.

On Teleportation

According to the Internet, there are three main theories about how to teleport.

1) THE STAR TREK MODEL: The most classic method. Something is scanned down to its atomic components, beamed across a certain distance, then re-assembled at a receiving point. Think of it as traveling via email. The issue with this method is the scanning and re-assembling of something as complex as say, the human body, is so difficult it would take millions of terabytes and incredibly complex machines to process it.

2) THE DIMENSIONAL MODEL: Also nicknamed “A Wrinkle in Time,” it suggests that people could teleport by opening a gate into a higher dimension, hanging around for a bit, then opening another gate once the old dimension reaches your destination point. While there is some “travel time” involved for the teleporter, to everyone else on Earth the journey would appear nearly instantaneous. I’m fuzzy on specifics, but from what I understand, it’s kind of like how planes can get to Europe faster by flying in arc instead of a straight line. While it’s a cool idea, most people think it’s impossible to actually travel and exist in another dimension. Which brings us to:

3) THE WORMHOLE MODEL: Think of it like a shortcut on a universal scale: you open a tunnel from one section of the universe to another, thereby significantly reducing travel time. Until now, this method has been largely ignored because a) the nearest wormhole was light years away, and b) it was assumed it would take the energy equivalent of a couple suns to create one.

But not only has Plankton figured out how to use dark energy to create wormholes, the Black Project 9 team has managed to stabilize them so you can actually send things through.

Like Fred and Barney said, for the last month or so they’ve been teleporting inorganic stuff – clocks, robot cars, even a little camera on wheels. There hasn’t been a lot to learn. From what I’ve heard, the clocks have come through stopped, and the cameras have recorded nothing but static and interference.

So Plankton and his team have been itching to send a human through. That’s what all the military guys have been hanging around for – once they get the method perfected for teleporting organic material, the soldiers are the first ones to make the trip.

But from what I’ve seen, they’re still several weeks away from that. A couple mice and a guinea pig have been sent through, but they’ve come out as little more than smelly puddles of ass-goo. I know this because I’m the one who’s had to clean it up. And folks, it ain’t pretty or aromatic.

The worst is, things are falling behind because of Doc Hotness. She’s in charge of the organic stabilization stuff, and so far it’s been working like a porn star at Sunday mass – i.e., not at all.

I’ve tried to strike up a conversation with her a couple times, but she’s been too stressed out to say more than a couple words. And so it was, I had my first “date” with Doc Hotness purely by accident.

TO BE CONTINUED …

Bombshell!

After two weeks of being stuck a half-mile underground, getting hazed by the jerk-off IT guy, and making no headway with Doc Hotness, I’ve finally discovered what it is we’re doing on Black Project Nine.

Since I was on a “need to know” basis, no one would outright tell me what the project was about, and it’s considered gauche for me to ask. So the usual ploy is to hang around and wait for someone to let something slip. And on most projects (I’ve been told), it takes about three days for that to happen.

But General Hard-Ass has been living up to his name, and he hits the roof any time anyone says anything relating to the nature of what we’re doing. I just hope I never have to play Texas Hold ‘Em with the tight-ass.

In spite of his efforts though, last night I finally got a glimpse of what we’re all working toward. I was in Lab 4 doing my usual nightly wipe-down, and a couple of underling lab coats (let’s call them Fred and Barney) came in to check on some calculations the computer had been crunching.

Realizing this was my chance to finally get some dirt, I ducked behind a gamma ray-emitter. Lab Coat #1 (Fred) checked the finished computations and cursed.

“Looks like Old Man Plankton was right. We’re going to need a much bigger energy burst to send a person.”

Lab Coat #2/Barney was perplexed. “Why? We’ve already ‘ported tons of other stuff.”

“Because, boson, that was all inorganic. If we send something fleshy through without stabilizing the gate, it’ll pop like a plum.” He scanned the figures. “We’ll have to re-configure the machines – maybe two, three weeks.”

“But I’m supposed to meet my S.O. in Phoenix at the end of the month.” Barney whined.

“Look at the upside, pukestain: when we’re done with this, no one’ll have to drive to get sex anymore. You’ll just be able to show up.”

They left the lab, still bickering, while I stayed behind the gamma emitter, wrapping my head around what I’d just heard. All the heightened security, the weird machines, and the huge amounts of dark matter we’re dealing with suddenly made sense.

Black Project 9 isn’t about building a new super-weapon. It’s not attempting to create a better stealth vehicle, or construct artificially intelligent robo-soldiers. It’s not even working on something connected with extra-terrestrial life forms.

No, this project is gunning in a whole different kettle of fish. I gotta hand it to Plankton: dude may be messy, but he shoots for the moon. He’s got this entire team of people trying to accomplish something that has previously only existed in comic books:

BP9 is attempting to achieve teleportation.

Bio-Hazing

Things haven’t been going well.

It’s been about nine days since I got transferred to Black Project #9, and a) I’ve barely had a chance to talk to Doc Hotness, b) I’ve been in the bunker the entire time, and c) being the sole janitor down here is work.

Here’s the problem: because I’m the only clean-up guy, I get called in for everything. And either this team is the clumsiest bunch of eggheads around, or the stuff they’re doing is more accident-prone, because I am getting called constantly. Working above ground might have been boring, but at least it wasn’t physically exhausting.

The first week here, I was busy for at least 18 hours a day. Disinfecting the new lab equipment, making sure the anti-radiation chamber was working properly, getting the incinerator and waste recycler on-line.

On top of that, I had the usual labcoat messes to deal with. Professor Plankton might be an okay guy, but he’s messier than Oscar the Grouch after a bad break-up. Soda cans, half-eaten sandwiches, office supplies – the dude doesn’t know how to pick up anything.

And as the icing on the cake, everyone on BP9 has basically been treating me like a sentient mop. I know labcoats and worker bees aren’t supposed to mix, but a little politeness would be nice. Maybe a “how’s it going, Joe?” or a “I heard it’s 105 on the surface” before you tell me to clean up the piss you sprayed all over the toilet seat.

But the shit didn’t really hit the coolant condenser until last night. I’d finally gotten all my projects under control, and was just settling in to watch a movie. (Upside to working for a top-secret government facility: the video on demand selection is choice.)

Right as Will Smith’s starting to kick alien ass in Independence Day, the sanitation alarm beeped. I checked my computer to see – God dammit – there’s been a dark energy leak in the control room.

Let me tell you something about dark energy. Nobody really knows what it is or how it works, even though it makes up 73% of the universe. But does that stop the military geniuses from fiddling around with it? Does a B-21 Bomber corner like a cement truck?

I’m not up on the specifics, but suffice it to say the nerds figured out how to use dark energy as a power source. An extremely volatile, toxic, unpredictable power source. If the shit comes in contact with regular matter, you basically get annihilation from a sub-atomic level on up. It’s so Darth Vader-scary, most projects at Groom Lake don’t even bother hassling with it. Except, natch, the black projects.

Even though I still have no clue exactly what everyone is doing on BP9 (I’m one of those on a “need to know” basis), I found out the first day that we had the biggest supply of dark energy in the entirety of Paradise Ranch. Which means if there’s a spill, I have that much more chance of having my sub-atomic ass handed to me.

So when I saw the words “dark energy” on my screen, I went into four-alarm overdrive. I pulled on every last bit of my protective gear, filled a push-cart with decontamination devices, and hauled ass through the maze of corridors.

The door of the control room was closed, but I knew that was standard procedure during a leak. I didn’t even bother to try the thumbprint scanner, I just ripped off the scanning plate and used the manual release to open the doors.

I busted inside, finding the entire team sitting calmly at their computers. Thinking they must not know about the leak, I started spraying everyone in reach with sterilizing foam and screaming like a crackhead who’s just broken his only pipe.

I had foamed down one or two underlings before General Hard-Ass took me down with a knee to the kidneys.

“What is your major malfunction, fuckwit?” He yelled, ripping the foam sprayer out of my hands. “We were just about to start our first project test!”

“But … there’s was a dark energy spill,” I stammered. Some of the labcoats started to titter, the soldiers were struggling to hold back smiles, and even Hotness had to cover her mouth.

“You moron,” he spat. “The only dark stuff in here is the shit sliding inside your brains. The DM supply’s behind three feet of steel on the other side of the facility!”

Looking toward the back of the room, I saw Phildo the Dildo smirking triumphantly. Everything fell into place – he must have posted a fake alarm to my computer, purely to get me to make an ass of myself in front of everyone.

“Sorry, sir,” I muttered. “It won’t happen again.”

“That’s right. Because if it does, I’ll pink slip your ass and get some other mop jockey to take over. Now how ‘bout you go scrub some toilets so we can do our work?”

I slunk back to my room, unable to even finish watching the movie because I was so depressed. I avoided the cafeteria for breakfast and lunch today, but sooner or later I’m going to have to see Hotness and explain myself.

I’d love to get out of here for a couple days, but I can’t leave the complex for the next two months unless it’s a medical emergency. It might be worth cutting off a finger just to avoid the embarrassment. Or maybe I could drink bleach and put myself in a coma.

I’ll have to think about it and let you know.

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.

Origin Story, Part One

Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to be a pilot.

The way I saw it, life on the ground was boring and slow. I wanted get higher, go faster, and I knew being a pilot was the only way to do it. It probably didn’t hurt that my dad was a jet jock, had been since before I was born. He flew every kind of fighter they made – F-14 Tomcats, F-18 Super Hornets, even the F-22 Raptor.

My mom ducked out when I was five, and Dad didn’t talk about her much. Any time I’d bring her up, he’d say some crap about how it wasn’t her fault, she loved me very much, and blah blah blah. I didn’t really mind; I never got the chance to know her, and as far as I could tell, most other kids’ moms just gave them a hard time.

So it was always just me and Pops. Sure, he had a couple girlfriends, but we moved around a lot, going from air base to air base, and they usually wouldn’t last. My army brat friends would bitch about the nomadic lifestyle, but I dug it. It was like I was part of The A-Team or something – every week a new home, a different adventure. I couldn’t stand to be in one place too long, seeing the same stupid faces, eating the same stupid food. Besides, moving kept me from getting too caught up with friends and whatnot, and let me focus on what I really wanted: learning how to be a pilot.


I’ll never forget the first plane I went up in: an old school F-4 Phantom II (see above). I was about seven, and my dad was flying it from some air base in Nevada to a de-commissioning facility in California. It was only an hour or so flight, so he got clearance to take me along.

As soon as I stepped on the wing, I knew I was home. I loved the feel of the warm metal under my hands, the sharp smell of the jet fuel, and the slick surface of the instruments. I had to sit against two parachutes and a cushion to get the straps tight around me, but it felt like I belonged there. And the take-off: Hole. E. SHIT. The velocity mashed me against the seat and I could barely open my eyes, but that speed was like taking a smack in the face from the hand of the Almighty himself.


It was a pretty uneventful trip, but I was absorbed the entire time. Dad kept us steady at about 10,000 feet, and I just gaped at the desert landscape below. He even let me take the stick for a little bit, and I’ll never forget the thrum of power I could feel in my hand. It was like holding the collar of some coked-up jaguar who was ready to go nuts at any second.

From then on, I was hooked. The second I graduated high school, I enrolled in the Air Force Academy. But two years in, my dad got sick – kidney cancer. He had nobody else, so I dropped out of the academy to take care of him.

You know what sucks about cancer? Everything. The chemo, the dialysis, and the frigging endless, tongue-swallowing line of pills. Eventually, both his kidneys were riddled in tumors and they had to take them out. I gave him one of mine, even though we both knew it would keep me from getting back into the Air Force.

But even that wasn’t good enough. This was some hardcore gangsta cancer he’d contracted, and it barreled through his body like a meth-head in a pharmacy. After five years of fighting the fucker, he died in a shitty VA hospital outside Flagstaff. There wasn’t much money left after the medical bills, and even though the Air Force said I could take a desk job at the academy, I couldn’t bear being around all those planes and not being able to fly them.

So I went on the move again, working a bunch of shitty jobs (hotel shuttle driver, pizza delivery guy, landscaping contractor) to pay the bills. And then one day I got a call from Dad’s brother Bill. (Don’t bother Googling; it ain’t his real name.) They’d never been really close, but he’d had heard I was looking for a job and wanted to help out. See, Uncle Bill was a brigadier general, and he knew about an opening at a military research facility. It wasn’t much responsibility, but it was stable and would get me working near planes again. There was just one catch:

The job was at Area 51.