Author - Mark Proulx

As the hole behind the shuttle began to close, the gloom within the Titanic corridor closed in around them. As total darkness enveloped them, Bat flipped on more of the interior lamps.

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The distraction was short-lived, however, as the orbiter began its slow trajectory towards the Earth’s shadow where the Mega Giant crept out of the darkness. Almost imperceptibly, the monstrosity faded into view, illuminated more and more by the sun’s rays streaming around the planet.

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A buzzer went off, waking Larry. He looked up and found the watch with the alarm he had set. Dammit…I hate it when I do that.

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In slow motion, it seemed, throngs of people pushed and shoved and fought each other to get a little closer to the front of the lines that formed at each checkpoint. Cars remained stationary…bumper to bumper…the people inside watching them with soulless and frightened eyes as the Hummer was granted special privileges to pass through ahead of them.

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They separated down the hall, each going their own way with an MP es**rt. Rob pulled open his console room’s glass door and just stood looking in, sighing.

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“Every creature on Earth – plants, fish, mammals, reptiles, even insects – produce energy as a result of simply being alive. We can record that energy and, through a series of calculations, easily show you what kind of energy consumption they expend. It’s called metabolism.

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IT probed the tiny creature it had “received.” Two feelers had attached themselves to its ocular organs; one ran down its main tract; two more went into orifices that led back into its main tract (for reasons IT could not comprehend); one feeler had to stretch out a small tube jutting out from its reproductive organs; and yet another feeler managed to slide easily up into a larger tract at the other end of the main tract.

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Reports poured in throughout the day from news stations across the globe issuing “late-breaking” news of the solitary, stationary object hovering over the Florida sky.

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The Space Shuttle Freedom dropped onto the dry lakebed at Rosamond early Sunday morning. The crew departed and went to their transport shuttle amid a flurry of reporters and photographers, who eagerly awaited Dr. Lazure’s arrival.

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OH, God! Can anybody hear me?…uh…we’re moving around again…I think we’re being turned around…I can’t understand it. If we got hit by space junk or a meteor, we should be spinning out of control!…uh…I can see the outer edge of the Mega Giant coming into view now…we’re definitely closer than our last known position…OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD! Are you seeing this? Can you hear me! Control!

Control! Something hit us hard! I can’t see anything! Something’s going on here! I don’t have any control over the craft! Repeat! I have no control over the craft! Commander! Talk to me! What’s going on! As if unable to hear communications coming from the space center, Gator continued to broadcast frightening messages about the shuttle crew’s plight.

Here was one of the things IT was looking for. And more of the little creatures had come with it. Purposefully, IT directed the tendril to reach out. At the exact same time, while monitoring the operator’s console onboard, Allen noticed a tiny ripple of a signal. Rob, sitting in front of the computer monitor at the space center, noticed the same flicker.

Exhaling a big breath of air, he was sure that Rob could hear the noise his heart made from where he was sitting. Thank God, he prayed in his mind. Thank God.

The problem that he had been wrestling with subconsciously became clear: the thing was super-efficient! Just as he had to go way off the scale high to measure power emanating from the thing, he’d have to go extremely low to measure any type of electrical activity being produced as signals.

He punched in a series of commands that brought up a real-time amplitude display and a scalable control graph. One of the biologists, a friendly young Latino man named Tino floated over and looked over Allen’s shoulder at the screen. “Hey!” Tino said.“Hey.”
Heard you kinda wigged out on us. You okay? Looking a little uncomfortable at the question, Allen replied, “Yeah.”

Anne took off her headset and fitted it over Allen’s head, adjusting the earpiece to fit him better. He made no attempt to stop her or even indicate that she existed.
Overwhelming fear gripped him. His mind was a total blank and he was oblivious to all external stimulation.

Commander Gator Cuevas maneuvered the shuttle closer and closer to the titanic in front of him. Having never performed maneuvers so close to an object this large before, and considering the surface was continually moving, he found himself relying more on sight than instrumentation.

A man watched the television screen. He listened intently as the network anchorman described the launch, the Mega Giant, and the destruction taking place around the globe. He watched with no emotion as the station played videos of the total obliteration of entire cities from the Earth’s crust opening up and literally swallowing them.

For a couple of hours Larry made light chit-chat while pouring drinks until the last of the amber liquid dribbled into Miles’s glass. Miles, fortunately, wasn’t drinking much anymore, having talked himself into his last corner. With the last of the liquor gone, so went his conversational tongue.

I have no fricking idea what the hell I’m doing! We know as much today about that thing as we did three weeks ago. We’re not prepared to handle something like this! We never were! All these years preparing, studying, theorizing, practicing, and drills. Didn’t mean a damn thing.

Miles had respected her wishes for as long as he could take it. The pressures of the job, however, soon forced him into the occasional drink after a hard day, cocktails with government officials, and company parties. Gritting her teeth, she bore the burden of knowing her husband was most certainly headed for disaster for years, patiently praying for him to realize the evil in him and change.

Vatican officials have conveyed to church members that should they feel the need to pray at any time, they would urge all local Catholic churches to remain open twenty-four hours a day for your convenience.

Because of the relatively low interest in getting buyers for housing there, realtors basically turned a blind eye to cult activity.

An astrophysicist we flew in from Helsinki and I think you know Gator Cuevas, one of our finest Cajun astronauts.

Allen had been working insanely long hours with the skeleton staff to investigate any possible means of attempting contact with the Mega Giant. Every possible method – and even some highly improbable ones – were employed to determine what - if any - level of intelligence existed in the thing.

Having stayed most of the first week at Canaveral and making only limited trips to his house in Cocoa Beach, he was ready to leave and spend his nights at home. Making trips only in the evening hours, he hoped to avoid the unbearable stench and sight of the bodies waiting to be taken away.

After a week of horrid cleanup duty, they began to allow people – those with proper identification – back in the area especially after the news stations began to investigate the “attack” a little more closely.

An attempt was made to catalog any personal belongings, but a vast majority of the bodies had been picked clean by looters and thieves – the wretched, miserable few who never owned much of anything in their lives and existed off whatever they could find.

Noticing Larry walking by the door - as he had been watching everyone else walking by – Doug dropped the stack of papers he was holding and bolted into the hallway.
“HEYHEYHEYHEYHEYHEY!” he yelled as he ran after him. He caught up to Larry a few doors down and jumped directly in front of him, effectively barring him from walking any further.

Considering how shorthanded they were and that the political situation has changed dramatically, he made up his mind quickly. Let him in,” he ordered. And as an afterthought, “Give him a level five security pass.” Miles hung up the phone and laid his head on his desk over his folded hands, as if in prayer. Between the constant barrage of phone calls from Washington, DC and the amount of misinformation floating around, he was getting a severe headache.

First a monster, now a weasel. At that very moment, she couldn’t decide which of the two was worse. Another ring.

I think I have a filter pickup problem or the integrity of
the signal’s bad, one. I’m looking for fresh signals of the
anomaly and I’m having technical difficulties on my end.

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The driver, caught between a rock and an embarrassed
place, simply held the mike and turned around to look at
Larry. He looked at the mike, then back down the aisle at
Larry, not knowing what to do.

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Doug Farrell chuckled to himself as he walked away from
the break room TV set. The press was brutal on Lazure, as
he expected after having leaked the story about the
doctor’s escapade.

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Getting on, he pulled his hand up behind his back and
flipped the entire group the middle finger. He walked
down the aisle and plopped down into a seat by himself
and sunk down low – below eyesight from the outside.

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“Dr. Leisure! Dr. Leisure! See anything interesting
while you were up there?” one reporter yelled.
“I hear he kept things well in hand,
”one woman snickered.
“Was it ‘hard’ having to manually operate the
equipment?” another reporter yelled.

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We’ve learned a great deal about our logic
systems and about some radical new
configurations over the past two days on some of
our equipment.

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Oh, come now, Dr. Lazure - pardon the pun, by
the way - we went to such extremes to bring it to
you. The least you can do is show some
appreciation for science, he emphasized
facetiously.

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Larry instantly had a sinking feeling in the pit of
his stomach. The head of mission control very
seldom made direct contact with anybody
onboard, since he was expected to be more
politician than a technician nowadays.

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