Starcosmo

Chapter 6: Zero Hour

One year later

Hills above Reno, Nevada

Zero hour

Chaz and Wan were on a nature hike when It appeared.

It was something they did, occasionally -- head up to the hills surrounding Reno and bum around for a while. Wan typically brought a camera and futzed around making some images while they were out.

Chaz, for his part, indulged no personal hobbies apart from his persistent need to get outside, away from all the screens and electronics and computers, and experience the freshness of the natural world. Well, what was still left that was natural, anyway.

The two friends had kept their silence on this trip, breathing heavily after the climb and not breaking the stillness of nature.

Tall desert grass licked at their boots as they crested a hill. In the distance, Nevada Patrol drones circled, surveying the city and its suburbs. It was late afternoon, a few hours until sunset.

Wan had been focusing on the horizon, where the sky met distance mountains, when he brought his camera down from his face. “Take a look,” he handed it to Chaz.

Chaz lifted the camera and peered through the viewfinder, seeing the horizon brought closer by the telephoto lens. There was a weird sort of rain on the horizon; faint, sparkling streaks. “That’s weird,” he said. He snapped a few frames and passed the camera back to Wan.

Wan took a few photos also. “Some atmospheric effect,” he said. “It’s getting closer.”

The pair watched as the slow sparkles of an unknown rain danced closer to them, a beautiful painting evolving in silent motion.

In another moment it was upon them, a hissing sound racing past the hill. A half-dozen spears of light dazzled the air around them with the crackle of ionization.

“Wow,” Chaz breathed. He felt his heart speed up by a tiny amount.

In a lifetime of researching obscure phenomenon, this was still only the second time he’d experienced one.

Chaz and Wan turned to follow the progress of the phenomenon. It faded as it swept over downtown Reno and retreated towards the Northwestern horizon.

They turned back in the direction from whence the rain had come. Then, just then, the Lights appeared.

It started as a faint shimmering in the atmosphere that looked for all the world like the beginning of the aurora borealis; then, with another shimmer, an oval, in the hue of the light pinks and ochre of the setting sun; and then, opposite it, another oval, such that the two ovals appeared as wings of unparalleled beauty, bound between with multiple luminous bands of twisting, arched, ethereal buttresses.

Neither of the two could say anything. As they watched, the Lights changed in front of their eyes.

It rotated in place and expanded; when it first appeared, it covered about two fists’ worth of sky; as it rotated slowly, one oval expanded, gradually occluding the other, and the numinous filaments that had appeared to join the two flared out both above and below, sometimes arcing back to connect to the main body, sometimes flaring into space, looking like nothing so much as the prominences on the sun.

The expansion continued until even two spread hands could not blot the object out.

“What is it?”

Wan took a deep breath. “HAARP?” he quipped, then raised his camera.

It was Wan’s way of whistling in the dark. Every video on Gtube that featured an inexplicable atmospheric phenomenon was cited by commenters as HAARP this, HAARP that.

The HAARP was the High Frequency Active Auroral Research program. It was essentially a big antenna farm that shot a 3.6 megawatt radio wave into the ionosphere, a $250 million toy meant to study how radio waves bounce off the ionosphere.

But what they were seeing was no ionospheric interference or high frequency radio wave. This was some sort of animated, moving. . . thing.

“It looks. . . organic,” Chaz said. He looked over at his friend. “You getting this?”

Wan didn’t reply for a moment. All was still and silent, except for the chatter of his camera shutter. “I’m getting it.”

The object looked bigger. “Is it growing, or is it just me?”

Wan scoped the image, swinging his camera left and right. “Not just you,” he said, “It’s about 20 degrees of width and 10 of height.”

Chaz looked back towards Reno.  On the Interstate,  it looked like traffic was stopping. Same on the part of McCarren Parkway he could see. “End of the world?”

Wan looked out from behind his camera, then over at Chaz. “May be, partner,” he said. “May be.”

“In that case,” Chaz said, “Maybe we should go check out what’s happening on the Internet.”

* * *

That first night of the Lights there were seven deaths, their heart stopped at the shock and suddenness of it. Mass hysteria afflicted twenty-one cities in the Northern hemisphere wand over 2,000 were hospitalized for stroke, fainting, weeping, sudden exhaustion.

After that first Appearance, there was a mostly sleepless and sweaty seventy-two hour-period in which the international scientific community collectively shat a fine, heavy brick. The governments of various nations collectively trundled to dour podiums and made august and meaningless pronouncements that only served to reinforce their burgeoning irrelevancy.

That thrilling, majestic appearance of The Lights wasn't the only thing they were concerned about; if it had been just that, the governments could probably have covered it up as the largest single episode of mass hallucination in recorded history, brought about by the rare combination of toxicants in a genetically modified, imported soy crop and the fluoridated water, and the interaction therein, and then done damage control with a messy and public celebrity divorce-homicide that would dominate the airwaves for the subsequent three months or until they were sure everyone had forgotten about the weird incident.

But it wasn't just the Lights; It was also the Shrooms.

The Silver Rain had directly preceded The Lights, and many believed them to be intimately linked phenomena, and had committed themselves, despite the massive collective scientific admonishment that correlation does not equal causation,  to unraveling the unknown origin of one or both phenomenon, and/or linking them inextricably together.

Eleven-year-old Jaden Shadenfort had played the role of star witness of the Shrooms, as one of the first humans to see, touch, pick and, yes, ingest the damn things -- but she was not to be recognized as such until much later.

Jaden had been grabbed by her father and rushed to the hospital just about immediately after she turned around and faced him, holding a bulbous, massive mushroom in her hand, a generous hunk torn out of it and being vigorously snacked on, a speculative and faraway look in her eyes.

For his part, Luther Shadenfort had wasted no time in smashing the mushroom from her hand while grabbing her, shouting "Don't you ever put anything in your mouth that came from space!" and hustling her into the family station wagon and to the nearest hospital, 25 miles away.

He, too, had seen the Lights in its brief appearance, but had thought very little of it in his mad dash for the safety of his only living daughter.

By the time they arrived at the hospital, Jaden was fine, napping in the back while singing to herself softly in her sleep, a classic rock ballad that went, "Can't read my, can't read my, no he can't read my poker face." She was separated from Luther and put under observation in a locked ward. It was not even two hours before the men in military uniforms with no name, rank or insignia came to collect her.

When they hustled her away, she still hadn't woken up.

Two hours later, the Pentagon had declared any bio-luminescent fungi a threat to national agricultural security, and ordered them burned on sight.

* * *