Chapter 1A

"My name isn't that important, in fact it's probably best for both you and I if you just think of me as John. Stop looking all around like that! I know it's weird to hear a voice just begin talking in your head — but you need to act normal or else we may both suffer the consequences!

"That's much better. Let me answer a few questions for you right off the bat. No, you're not going crazy. Yes, I'm real and you aren't imagining me. Now, so you know that I'm real, just casually look across the café and you'll see me sipping me coffee with the latest Harry Potter book in my hand. No! For goodness sake don't get up! Just stay right there."

I had stopped off at my favorite coffee spot on a Tuesday morning. I locked my bike up in the rack, bought a newspaper and a large coffee and sat down against the wall at a table that offered a nice view out the front window without being directly in the strong summer sunlight. I was just perusing the comics and sipping my coffee when a voice began speaking inside my head!

I looked around frantically trying to figure out who was talking to me and how as the coffee sprayed out of my mouth! The voice told me to act normal or we'd both "suffer the consequences!"

"John" as he'd called himself began to tell me a story too wild for the X-files. At his direction I looked across the café and spotted him. He was one of the least memorable persons I'd ever seen; not that he was ugly — just very average with nothing to make him stand out in a crowd. I took a reasonably good look at him and then did the same with several other individuals in the café just to avoid signaling him out.

You might wonder how I could distinguish his voice in my head from other stray thoughts or impressions I might have from time to time. The answer is hard to put into words — but it didn't feel like me or 'sound' like me.

When you hear someone speaking their voice becomes identifiable to you by tonal qualities, uniquely distinct pronunciations, subtle inflections, and other acoustical characteristics that give the voice its own 'signature' if you will. Then there are other things that may clue you in to the voice not coming to you in the normal fashion — like in an old movie theater for instance. You were listening to a voice that seemed to be coming from everywhere and it wasn't very realistic. Now the newer cinemas get all of the directional issues correct and the voice sounds like it is coming from the location you'd expect it to in relation to the visuals on the screen.

John's 'voice' seemed to be coming from directly in front of me — yet there was no one there. I wouldn't have mistaken it for one of my own thoughts since my thoughts don't manifest themselves as voices. Maybe other people aren't the same as me and do hear 'voices' in their heads from time to time, but this was a first for me. As clear as if the person speaking were directly in front of me and with absolutely no interference from other sounds in the room. So yes! It startled me a lot! I'm most happy the worst thing that happened was me spitting out some coffee. If John hadn't quickly tried to calm me down I probably might have ended up shitting myself!

Now, having someone be able to project a voice inside your head from across a café is pretty whacked — but it's better than wondering if a ghost isn't trying to communicate with you or some other such mystical nonsense.

John apparently worked in two capacities for a low profile, privately funded research organization monitoring unusual, possibly alien, activities on earth. It was all very hush hush kind of stuff. Apparently there was some sort of covert connection with several government agencies. The more John got into this part of his story the more I understood why they'd want someone who could blend in a crowd and not stand out.

Apparently John had been sent on what he had thought was going to be another wild goose chase, this time out in the national forests of Arizona. He was following a lead that came in from a surveillance satellite. As I followed this part of his story I wondered what would be so interesting about monitoring a largely unpopulated area. In any case there were repeated cases of most unusual light shows clearly captured by the satellite. John described them as a mini Aurora Borealis type displays. His most recent assignment was to go out and find out what caused them to suddenly appear in an area where no such phenomena had ever been reported before.

John flew to Flagstaff and rented a Jeep Liberty to get around in. Using the coordinates supplied to him he managed to find the general area with his GPS unit. It was getting pretty late in the afternoon and he knew he'd be able to look for the 'lights' better after dark so John reclined the driver's seat back to take a nap for an hour or so.

John must have been more tired than he thought. When he woke up he realized that he'd slept for nearly five hours. It was about ten at night and fully dark out. He unlocked the driver's side door and stepped out of the vehicle. His plan was just to hang around until midnight or so, head back to civilization and file his report in the morning. He expected things to pretty much read "I came, checked things out, I found nothing." It seems things rarely work out the way we expect them to though.

After draining his lizard John took a look around and found that he was in a fairly flat and open area in a mixed growth forest with quite a bit of pine, but some other trees here and there as well and quite a bit of space in the clearing he had stumbled upon. He sat down on a rock about ten or fifteen feet inside of the forest but not too far from the clearing and began to chew on a stick of beef jerky he had brought along.

It was kind of fun being out in the forest and getting paid for it — but it was all pretty conventional so far and boring. That changed after a while when John realized that he could hear an unusual sound. When he was telling me about it he kept calling it an 'alien kind of singing'. He wasn't able to give me any real idea about what that meant.

Anyway as the 'singing' continued the strange, intense, greenish light shown down from above. It seemed to come from a single point about a hundred feet above the forest floor but it was too bright there for John to see what the source of the light was. As the cone of light played across the forest floor John was amazed to see what looked like mushrooms growing at a pace where he could see them get bigger moment by moment.

The mushrooms didn't just grow to their normal size, if these were even normal mushrooms or mushrooms at all for that matter, they grew to enormous proportions with 'heads' that were more than eighteen inches in diameter. John picked several of the 'mushrooms' at the edge of the clearing and placed them in the back of the rental vehicle. When he returned to the clearing, the unusual mushrooms were being plucked from the ground by an unseen hand and floating upwards towards the source of the strange light.

John figured there must be some kind of cloaked alien ship and that they were just engaged in some harmless agriculture. In any case he had something to report on in the morning as well as the evidence he had harvested and stored in the Jeep Liberty. The clearing itself looked untouched except for a few little marks in the layer of topsoil where the mushrooms had been plucked up.

John drove back to town looking forward to a few hours of sleep in his room at the Hotel 6. He spotted an unattended janitors cart at the end of the hall and heisted two garbage bags. One more trip back to the Jeep and he had placed the 'mushrooms' in the garbage bags so they wouldn't be seen. He carried the bags into his room and hit the sack.

The next day John woke up, checked out of the hotel, and went out for breakfast. While he was sitting in the restaurant John realized that he was hearing the thoughts of other people. The more people around him the 'louder' the volume became. The 'noise' was really starting to get to him and not knowing what to do John asked the waitress to box things up and paid his bill so he could get out of the crowded place. He drove south out of Flagstaff down I-17 for a little while and then took an exit at Oak Creek Canyon. He parked in an out of the way parking lot and finished his breakfast in peace while thinking of what all of this could mean.

He seemed to have developed telepathic communication — at least one way communication anyway. He hadn't tried to communicate with anyone and so far he'd only been hearing people's random thoughts and nothing incredibly useful. He got out of the Jeep and walked along for a while until he came to a visitor's center with about ten or fifteen people inside. It took a while to get the hang of just listening to one person's thoughts instead of receiving the jumble from everyone at once, but he got the knack of it. John told me he had to envision a sort of 'balloon' around his mind. If he aimed the 'neck' of the 'balloon' at the person he wanted to hear it seemed to filter out everyone else and tune in on that person.

After a while he tried to send a thought "the pamphlet about horseback riding looks interesting." The woman he had tried to send the thought to picked up the pamphlet and turned to her companions and said "this could be interesting!"

So that began a few days of experimentation for John. He didn't really want to tell his superiors what he had found fearing he end up a guinea pig in some scientist's lab. So John told them he had fallen ill and hadn't yet begun his research and would get back to them as soon as he could get back to work. The receipts from his corporate credit card would already show that he was in the Flagstaff area so he didn't lie about that.

John was just bumming around town trying to learn more about his new abilities when fate stepped in and dealt him a severe blow. John had just stepped out of a deli on Birch Avenue and was walking towards his rental vehicle when a man wearing a ski mask ran out of the bank waving a gun and telling everyone to get down. When John started to obey the man stopped him, tossed him some keys and said "Not you!" He pointed to a gray sedan and got into the vehicle on the passenger side while saying "You drive," all the while waiving the gun around to ensure cooperation.

John didn't hesitate to obey his high strung passenger and immediately pulled away from the curb while asking "Where to?" His passenger rattled off some directions while constantly looking around to see if they were being followed. The man knew what he was doing. He had on rubber gloves and was quickly transferring money from a bank bag to a large satchel. He must have known that the bank bag would have a dye bomb or a transponder inside of it. They were passing over a creek when he threw the mostly empty bank bag out of the window along with his gloves and ski mask.

John could hear his passenger's thoughts and it terrified him. The man had done this before and if the robber followed his usual modus operandi John would be killed to cover the bandit's tracks with a bullet if they were out in the middle of nowhere or he would be stabbed to death. The man had him switch cars on a tiny little side road and then strangely enough drive back into town.

He directed John up an alley and then had him get out of the car. He was behind a building with a small loading dock. The man told him to walk between the building and the one next to it and head for the street. Almost as soon as John had his back turned to the man he felt an incredible pain in his right lower back and knew that he had been stabbed. The knife came four more times in rapid succession despite John's best efforts to get away. Feeling desperate John tried to send feelings of intense pain into the man's mind. The man's nervous system overloaded from the intense sensations John was pumping into him and he had a fatal stroke. John rolled out from under his assailant's body and pulled himself into a standing position using the wall of the building to brace himself. He staggered along the wall until he came out onto the sidewalk running alongside the busy street and collapsed.

Someone called an ambulance and John was rushed to the hospital. His kidneys were both torn up and he had major damage to several other internal organs. The doctors operated on him and did their best to patch him up. On his second day of being awake he received a visit from one of his organization's 'clean up' men. He could read the man's thoughts as clear as if they were written in black and white. John knew too much information about organizations and agencies his superiors didn't want the public to become aware of. No longer able to be of use due to his extreme injuries, John was considered to be a liability and a potential leak while medicated. The man in the black suit was here to 'close off' the threat.

John sent a wave of severe pain at the black suit until the man passed out. He yanked the IV's from his arm and weak as he was managed to strip the man's clothing off of him and put it on himself. Miraculously he walked out of his room under his own power snagging a book off of the desk at the unoccupied nurses' station and made it into the elevator. A taxi ride later and he was far enough away from the hospital and immediate danger to relax a bit. He sat down inside of a café and ordered coffee black.

"So now you have the whole picture — or at least as much as I do. I'm about to die. Either they'll get to me, or my injuries will finish me off. It's just a matter of time now.

"Yeah, I can hear your questions and that's a good one. Why'd I pick you to tell this to? Well you won the lottery kid. Out of the six or seven other people in this place this morning, you seem the most deserving. I want you to come over here and I'll give you the keys to my rental and tell you where it's parked. If it's still there than you can see if touching those 'mushroom' thingies does the same for you.

"The possibilities are too tremendous to just let this secret die with me and I don't want the dickheads back at the organization having this kind of power. That's it just walk on over and pick up the keys by my saucer. Try not to let anyone see you pick them up.

"No. Don't stay and don't worry about me kid — there's nothing more you could do anyways and I did appreciate you listening to my story. I'm just going to sit here and sip the last cup of coffee I'll probably ever have. You go and get out of here quick. Good luck!

"Oh! One last thing — and you damn well better remember this — ARG369T. Got it? ARG369T. Now scram!"

And so that was it. I picked up the keys and found the Jeep Liberty parked right where he said it would be. It had a sticker on it marking it for towing, but luckily I had beaten the towing service. I tossed my bike in the back and drove it to my apartment where I carried in the bags of 'mushrooms'. Then I drove it to a rather empty parking lot behind a warehouse, pulled my bike out, and carefully wiped the vehicle down to remove any of my finger prints.