Back at base, the guys plugged the flash drive into a laptop. They clicked on the folder labeled "Harkness," and found the motherlode of information. Shipman had apparently tracked Harkness' movements for the past several years, everything from LinkedIn profiles to screenshots of Facebook statuses to credit scores, it was all there. They found documentation of his current whereabouts, apparently Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. "This bitch has documentation of f*cking everything about this guy! Why is this necessary? What's next, his tax records?" Said one of the men, clearly shocked.
"It doesn't matter what the base commander thinks of this man, she's clearly obsessed, what matters is that we go to Vegas and drag his ass back to base!"
"How are we even going to get to Vegas? Shipman doesn't want Harkness here!" He bitched.
"Bro, are you looking at the screen? She clearly f*cking does!" He replied.
"Won't she just send the retrieval team, like she always does?" He asked.
"Nope. This is in our hands. We'll have to um, how do I put it? Oh yes! 'Borrow' the school bus!" He replied.
"Can't we just take the plane?" He bitched again. The plane and the school bus in question were the two main methods of base personnel transport, the plane was a 737 with blacked out windows and no livery, just a red stripe running down the fuselage, which left McCarran International Airport every morning, and returned at nighttime. The school bus was a white school bus with US Government license plates and blacked out windows. The bus was the only vehicle with clearance from the Camo Dudes, Area 51's Delta Force security guards, to cross the gate into the base.
"We can't just steal a goddamn 737! None of us know how to fly, and we'd probably get court marshaled and retconned for trying!" Retconning was the top secret process of wiping one's memory after they'd seen too much. It was a process often done to former Area 51 employees who couldn't keep their mouths shut about what they had seen.
"And you think you can just jack a bus?"
"Of course I can, they've got plenty of backups! We'll just take one of those!"
"What about the Camo Dudes?"
"Do you really think they'll give us hell for leaving the base without a permit? They'll clearly know we're authorized personnel. It's getting back in that'll be a bitch!"
"Is Harkness even that vital to the process, this seems too risky..."
"Of course he is, dumbass!" He gestured towards the door. "Come on. We're going to Sin City."
A former astronaut candidate, Tyler Harkness was one of the most interesting members of the Operation Extragenesis team. At the age of 25, he was one of the youngest people to ever be selected by NASA to be an astronaut as part of Astronaut Group 14 in 1992, where he trained to be a mission specialist alongside future big names like Scott Parazynski, Jerry Lineger, and even future ISS commanders Michael López-Alegría, Chris Hadfield, and Koichi Wakata, the latter two becoming the first Canadian commander/the first guy to film a music video in space, and the first Japanese commander, respectively. With a PhD in astrobiology from Cambridge, a master in aerospace engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, and multiple other double degrees, including ones in Russian and Chinese, Harkness had plenty of training before NASA. He was a Boy Scout who earned his Eagle, a marching band section leader(not counting the summer he later marched in the Santa Clara Vanguard Drum and Bugle Corps), competed at the state level in chess, earned the Right Stuff Award from the US Space Academy in Huntsville, Alabama, and even made it to the National Science Fair. He skipped several grades due to his immense intellect, graduating high school at the age of 12, and his first of many degrees at 16, graduating summa cum laude. He had earned his pilot's license before he earned his driver's license, an achievement shared by Neil Armstrong. Due to his achievements, Tyler made it into a Boys' Life magazine article, where he announced his intent to become an astronaut. He traveled around the world giving TED talks and interviews, and was even invited to the Vatican Observatory by Pope John Paul II. As soon as he received his PhD in astrobiology, he applied to NASA as a joke. Because of the fall of the Soviet Union, NASA had began talks with the newly established Roscosmos to rendezvous a shuttle with space station Mir. Tyler's degree in Russian had served him well, and he got a call back offering him a job.
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The Kuiper Abnormality: Or Humanity, we are all doomed.
SciencefictionDuring the 1990s, an Einstein-Rosen bridge was discovered by NASA and the Russian Federal Space Agency in the outer reaches of the solar system. A sample return mission was covertly dispatched, and the country's brightest minds were assembled in pre...
