Suzanne Beecher

Dear Reader,

Today is the day, at midnight this year's Write a DearReader Contest ends. I've been enjoying reading entries and I can still read yours, but you must email it today.

You'll find all the contest info, including last year's winning entries here.

Winning entries will be posted in November.

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@firstlookbookclub.com

P. S. This week we're giving away 10 copies of the book Hole In The Sky: A Novel by Daniel H. Wilson. Click here to enter for your chance to win. 

AN OPEN LETTER

GAVIN CLARK // Washington, D.C.

Emerging Weapons Technologies Group, Department of Defense

We walked out of the Spiro Mounds in Oklahoma still covered in the liquid we found beneath, our lungs rasping with that alien atmosphere, skin shining and slick. We walked out with our eyes flat and our souls empty. We lost a lot of people down there, and we walked out with more than we expected.

We walked slowly. We waited. We obeyed commands shouted through megaphones.

I told the others to keep their hands raised, palms out. The crosshairs of a dozen snipers would have been trained on us as we appeared from the mouth of the crater. I could hear the choppers circling, blades lazily beating the air. There were so many eyes above us: a fleet of drones, rotary-bladed predators, wheeling overhead with their camera irises spiraling in.

We emerged with our faces turned up, squinting as we basked in the warm light of our own sun.

The Cherokees were huddled close. And I'll admit, I felt a twinge of envy. Being "left out of the lodge" is what my Native friends called that pinch, half smiling, pointing at me with their lips. While we were in that dark hole, they had been forged into a family. They had made sense of what happened. Together.

And here I was with my hands free. My calendar free. The whole rest of my life looking pretty free.

The memories haven't stopped flickering through my thoughts, like traces of lightning . . . Things I saw that couldn't have existed. How my ears popped when we walked right through that old, weathered spot in reality. The unnatural shapes churning just under the surface of those black waters.

I guess it took a little while to sink in . . .

The real honest lie of it all is that this isn't my story to tell. It never was. I don't have any deep revelations to share. I'm not the type of guy this kind of stuff could ever make sense to.

It's like they said—I was never really inside the lodge.

I understand and acknowledge that as director of the Emerging Weapons Technologies Group, it was my sworn duty to generate an actionable report on the Incident: a plan that would help the secretary of defense ensure that our military could form an appropriate response to future threats.

I couldn't do any of that very effectively.

There is no doubt that the Incident threatened national security. From the moment the object was observed—I believe there was an existential threat not only to our lives, but to our civilization's fundamental concept of reality, of how we perceive the world and our place in it.

But I'm telling you there are things out there that we can never track with a space telescope, or threaten with a sleek weapon, or bottle up and shove into a laboratory. The thing we found . . . it doesn't even fit into my mind.

This report is out of my hands now, except for one last note:

I don't know if the four of us were chosen. And if so, by whom. But it is very likely that the unique voices represented in this document are the reason that billions of human beings exist today in a world they can see, and touch, and feel.

Humankind crept away from the light of our only fire. We gazed into the void. And we lived to tell about it.

The Incident began at the edge of known space, at the very moment when we as a species departed the shallow cradle of our solar system to swim the deep black water between stars. It began at the spot where the fire of our sun dims, where the warmth of its light recedes, and where true darkness starts.

It all began at heliopause.

PART I

DETECTION

Heliopause: outer boundary of the 'heliosphere,' the spherical region around the sun that provides a protective shield of outward- flowing solar wind, and beyond which lies the raw, infinite expanse of interstellar and intergalactic space.

1

DETECTION

THE MAN DOWNSTAIRS // Undisclosed Location Detection, T-Minus 6 Hours

It began as a weekend art project during my eighth year of graduate school. On a lark, I had programmed a simple chatbot to write silly poems based on USGS data from seismic waves—all the bumps and rattles coming from the interior of the planet's surface. Then I added an input containing the static fuzz detected by a certain radio antenna trained on distant stars. Finally—and this is the part I have come to regret the most—I complemented this data stream with biometric data from my own wrist-worn fitness tracker device.

I called my project 'Thoughts of the Universe.'

It was just a joke—a goofy little project squeezed between a selfplaying video game and a kite rigged to take Polaroid pictures from the air, letting the images flutter down to the startled people it had surveilled. But after a few months of posting a ceaseless stream of slightly poetic nonsense, my project happened to output the precise magnitude and location of a coronal mass ejection—a wall of solar plasma that would violently cripple a host of highly classified military satellites.

Thing is—it was an event that would occur ten hours later.

'Thoughts of the Universe' had somehow glimpsed the future.

A NOAA scientist researching geomagnetic disturbances discovered my website and saw the impossible timing of the prediction. Later, a CIA analyst caught wind of it. After I failed to provide a satisfactory explanation, 'Thoughts of the Universe' was summarily shut down and all data confiscated for further study. I was removed from my academic position and "offered" a mandatory government job. All traces of my studies, my tenure in the computer science program, and educational records were erased.

This was twelve years ago.

(continued on Tuesday)

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