Sixth in the series. Read after the break…
Insight
By Scott Lowther
Copyright 2019
1964, February: Brass Valley
Agent Cole shivered. It wasn’t the cold… even though the temperature was far below freezing outside, inside the Snow Cat the temperature was good and warm. No, the shiver came from the view. The sun was doing things it shouldn’t, and illuminating sights best left unseen.
He and a team of researchers had climbed up an ancient mountain path to one of the many, many crumbing ruins. The Hidden Mountains occupied a large portion of the region code named Brass Valley; thousands of square miles of Antarctica that were not on any map. They could not be seen from air, or from space, or from the ground; hundreds of miles wide, someone in a dog sled could cross the region in a split second and never know it.
Brass Valley was tucked away from geographic reality through alien science advanced far beyond even the appearance of magic. It was still there, still a part of Antarctica, but it was folded through geometries beyond current human understanding. It was certainly beyond Agent Cole’s understanding. One of the scientists based near the dead alien city on the 20,000-foot-high plateau tried to explain it to him once, and he quickly felt his eyes cross. The system involved the use of crystals and an intricate clockwork mechanism in one of the central buildings. The system had failed once, early in the 1930’s, allowing a team of explorers to stumble across the region; it started up again shortly after, hiding the region from a subsequent expedition. It had failed again in the mid 1940’s, and that was when the Office of Insight came in and took possession of the whole place. The mechanism, located in the appropriately nicknamed “Origami House,” had been quickly found and re-activated. The experts had examined the machine, saw that it was trying to move but was blocked by fallen bits of stonework; a simple job of sweeping away dust and grit allowed the mechanism to start up again, closing up the hidden region in the blink of an eye. Since then, a careful eye had been kept on the mechanism. A supply of WD-40 was on hand at all times.
Not a single scientist who examined the system had the slightest clue how it worked, but they knew how to operate it, how to adjust the field to open convenient doorways. And that had to be enough: keep it running, let trucks and planes in and out, otherwise don’t mess with it.
Humans had made a sufficiency of mistakes throughout history. The Office of Insight was here to make sure that avoidable mistakes were foreseen… and avoided.
The mechanism in Origami House allowed the personnel stationed in Brass Valley to keep the place hidden. Soviet aircraft and spacecraft regularly photographed Antarctica; if the mechanism failed, the Soviets would doubtless show up in force and World War III would promptly begin. So the mechanism was maintained and left on, with just a few well-defined gaps to allow aircraft and ground vehicles access. It was a great device. Everyone loved it. But what it did to the sky…
Cole looked out the windshield towards the horizon. The sun was there, low and clear… and shattered, fragmented. The sky was like a broken mirror, casting the image of the sun in pieces here and there. As the sun moved virtually horizontally across the sky, its image hopped and skipped.
Once, Cole had asked how the sun could shine at all on Brass Valley, if it had indeed been folded out of its normal space. He’d also asked about how the winds could blow through, how Antarctica could be so well mapped, with no obvious distortions in distance. The scientist had looked at him sadly and, after a moment, simply said “don’t ask.”
That was damn near the motto of the Office of Insight, Cole thought to himself. It employed the most curious people on the planet, and presented them with the greatest mysteries and challenges that an intellectual could ever hope to come across… and then taught them to not delve too deeply. Yes, there were threats that needed to be understood and countered. But the worst thing that anyone could do would be to accidentally speed the process along. Mistakes like that had been made. And one of the first things new agents, researchers and scholars were shown was a presentation on the results. In glorious Technicolor. Barf bags were provided.
Off in the distance, Cole caught a brief glimpse of the Madness Mountains range, some 300 miles away Usually the distant and the near-everpresent haze mercifully hid that truly monstrous pile of rocks, but the sun, just for a moment, was in the right spots to light them up almost clearly. Along with the vast thing that was sometimes seen beyond them. Cole shuddered again and quickly looked away. He watched the sun do its thing, and tried to not think about it too much. Just accept it, and maybe you won’t go mad.