The Past Is Calling

Roberts glanced over to the left side of his desk, seeking a particular folder.

"Ah", he thought, "there it is" as he reached to grab it.

Just then, the voice of Adrienne, his admin assistant, came through over the intercom:

Mister Roberts, Line Five. The Past Is Calling.

Reacting automatically, he picked up the handset and punched the fifth button in the row along the bottom of the telephone ...

For a moment, he did not know where he was. It was cold and darkness was closing. Snow all over the place and an uncomfortable sensation of long-forgotten weighty items. Ahead of him, a guttural voice spoke in a commanding tone. Instinctively, he dove into a snowbank just as a loud ripping noise rent the air above, with smacking sounds in the earthen bank behind him. Machine gun! Fear seized him and he curled into a fetal position as a vehicle with a loud motor and squeaking tracks approached his location. More voices in that other language. He realized he was tightly clutching a rifle, but couldn't shake his fear enough to point it to his front ...

A strange high-frequency noise steadily increased in volume and the entire area was suddenly illuminated as if a huge spotlight had been turned on. Roberts looked up as a loud pulsing sound accompanied what looked like elongated blobs of ... light ... energy ... shot over his position and impacted to his front.

Loud explosions and then screams ... and then silence.

But the illumination was still there and increasing in intensity. Finally it seemed centered over Roberts himself, bathing him in brilliant light. Shaking in terror, Roberts stared at the source of the illumination, amazed at how large it was. Putting his rifle down, he forced himself to speak.

"Are ... are you God?"

The "light" suddenly vanished and Roberts closed his eyes and felt as if he was falling.

After a moment, the familiar sound of the office air conditioning system filled his ears. Startled, he opened his eyes and stared at the telephone handset he was fiercely grasping. The line was dead, and he carefully replaced the handset on the receiver.

It took him a moment to stand; he felt shakey. Staggering to the door, he opened it and walked into the reception area. Glancing apprehensively at Adrienne, he mumbled, "I'm taking a short stroll, I'll be back."

Adrienne simply side-eyed him with a mysterious little smile.

-END-

a reply to: F2d5thCavv2

Nice little piece of flash fiction here. It strikes a bit of a Twilight Zone vibe in my mind.

a reply to: F2d5thCavv2

That was great, it reads like a prelude that could go anywhere and the battlefield imagery is very realistic.

I like Adrienne!

a reply to: F2d5thCavv2

Well written! Amazing!

Not bad. Like how you couched the imagery in between the scenery almost like layers were floating and kind of wove into one another. Descriptive. Nice arrangement. You framed the imagery well enough to portray what you were trying to convey, almost like a book or film would. I like when people can do that, because it's not a skill set you see very often. Maybe I'll come across you around the bend on here and we can... "get into it."... 😆 ... See ya!

👍

a reply to: F2d5thCavv2

It's good to see you posting stories again, F2d5thCavv2!

And an exciting story it is, too. Makes one's imagination run riot.

a reply to: Encia22

You are so correct!!!

a reply to: Encia22


See you can't just go using the royal one if you are rioting in your head.

The best way to take care of royal rioting in ones brain..is to stop by at the place and say "can someone take care of my head riot" and they'll probably offer a libation. But do not take it from me. I do take up algol against lafae.


⚔⚔💀

Thanks all. You're kind readers.

Cheers

a reply to: F2d5thCavv2

😝🙂

=2=

Markman regarded the document on the table.

Typewritten: itself a characteristic indicative of an older era.

The contacts they had developed at NARA occasionally payed off. The document was what they called, with good reason, an OOPART. It had simply emerged in the archives, at least according to the archivist who was an expert on those records. Before a month ago, as far as they could determine, the document had not existed. Yet, today, here it was, with a date indicating it was written in the waning days of World War II.



Markman poured a mug of coffee from the 'Silver Bullet' and began reading ...

- - -
The two jeeps pulled up behind a slight rise, the drivers keeping the vehicles close to the road because of the deep snow. Lieutenant Raker wordlessly signaled "Tiny" to cover an obvious avenue of approach with his Browning Automatic Rifle. At the jeep, Miller had trained the .30-caliber machine gun to cover a trail leading into the forest. Pointing to Kline, Raker grasped his carbine and indicated they should move forward.

The mission statement had been ambiguous. "Something" involving lights and explosions had happened to the front of the 1st Battalion, and Raker's I&R Platoon was tasked with assessing the incident.

Raker and Kline moved forward in short bounds, one covering the other as they moved. As they came around a bend in the road, Raker stopped, taking in the scene before him.

Something like fifteen German soldiers lay dead in the snow, ahead and along the sides of an assault gun, which was clearly out of action. There were no shell or bomb craters, no sign that mines had detonated. Just dead men and a wrecked self propelled gun.

Kline examined one of the corpses. The man's Wehrbuch stated he had been in the SS mountain infantry. But the wound ... like nothing Kline had ever seen. There was a big part of his torso gouged out in a neat cut ... but no blood on the ground. It was as if the wound had been immediately cauterized. Raker stared at the wrecked gun. The battle damage was very odd. There was a spherical chunk of it missing by the gun mantle that included a complete and large penetration of the frontal armor. Clearly there must have been considerable heat involved, as the ammunition inside the vehicle had detonated and cracked its hull.

Raker and Kline checked the other corpses. Similar "cauterized" wounds and no blood. The two men pulled back to the jeeps, eased onto the icy road, and slowly made their way back to friendly lines.
- - -

Markman clucked his tongue and took a sip of the coffee. The description of the wounds reminded him of mutilation reports, although those were usually more precise. Whatever had happened, it sure as Hell wasn't caused by weapons fielded by the Army in 1945. Thanking the archivist, he requested the document be scanned and sent to him via the classified email system.

One more piece of the puzzle, he thought.

=2=

Cheers

a reply to: F2d5thCavv2

This is excellent, F2d5thCavv2! The story is evolving and gripping.

a reply to: Encia22

Thanks Encia!

Wanted to see if ATS would stabilize before I continued.

I know some topics I want to mention, but have to figure out an ending ... always the hardest part.

Cheers

Problem with that(the past is calling) is it is a solo trip where everything is messed up and you're at fault for it... Carkavartins have such a job to turn a life if one does not know how to break that wheel conquer that wheel or can pay for messing all that up... one of those weird after "life" things while still having one becoming free from one with help? is a myth. aka Guruism.

Like dantes inferno he knew it well having messed it up but was still a guru through it.

=3=

Markman took a seat in his cubicle and logged into his workstation. Standing out in his list of emails was one with a shouted subject line:

HEADGAME

Messages with that as their subject were from a special information feed. A by-product of IC programs involving psychiatrists and psychoanalysts was that many of them had been recruited with the sole mission of reporting interesting or unusual patients and cases. From mundane reports concerning persons of interest to accounts of high strangeness, the HEADGAME feed provided a variety of tips that were often missed by conventional intelligence collection methods.

Markman clicked on the message, and began reading.

Holy Cr**, he thought after reading the first paragraphs; This is no coincidence .... A certain Charles Roberts had had a run-in with the unknown and was so disturbed by it, he called on a psychiatrist. The details related by Roberts dovetailed very well with the OOPART report he had seen the other day at NARA. No, thought Markman, that wasn't God, Mister Roberts. Far from it.

Picking up the handset of a yellowish-gold telephone, he dialed a four-digit number. His supervisor, as usual, did not pick up, so Markman summarized his finding to her voicemail. His final statement underlined a concern all of the people in his work group felt: "They're getting bolder." And how, he thought.

=3=

=4=

As Markman sat before his boss, he was, again, dismayed by her skepticism.

While her appointment to head the division in which he worked had been disparaged as "equal opportunity in action", he was well aware she was very sharp intellectually. It was just that she held preconceived notions with which she was unwilling to dispense, and in the field Markman worked in, that kind of bull-headedness was a disadvantage.

What she wanted was a neat and orderly world; one which comported with the standard histories of the postwar era. What Markman and his colleagues had been try to convince her of was a reality altogether different.

"Look, Markey", she said. "My grandfather was a black man in what was a segregated American military at the time. He was in a disadvantaged group, yet he and his fellows bested the toughest soldiers Germany had to offer at a town called Crossen ... I mean, America won completely in 1945 ... yet, you're trying to tell me that Germany was far ahead of us in terms of technology. If that is so, then why didn't they win World War Two?"

Markman sighed. Where to begin?, he thought. He recalled reading the report of a senior British officer who had been tasked with the recovery of German high technology as the Reich collapsed in 1945. His words had been stark: "We won the war with no time to lose." The implication was clear-- the Germans had projects underway, that had they matured, would have completely altered the nature of warfare as it was then understood.

"Boss", he said, "I hear what you're saying, but the truth is that some of the research done by the Germans is even today only partially understood. Yes, we won the war. But when our technical recovery teams sifted through what they had found, they realized the Germans had looked into topics that were completely unknown to both us and the Soviets. None of this is as straightforward as it has been made out to be."

She was staring hard at Markman, yet, her skepticism seemed a bit dented. "Okay", she said. "Educate me on this topic, Mister Markman."

=4=

=5=

Markman spoke up as his supervisor stared at him.

"Well, to give one example. You may know that when our physicists theorize about space-time, they use mathematics as a way of modeling how it works."

She nodded her head.

"The German approach was different. They rejected what they called Jewish science" ...

Her head pulled back. "Say what?"

Markman nodded. "Yeah, their ideology tainted almost everything in their society, to include pure science. Anyway, their approach to exploring space-time was much more hands-on. They didn't want to model it at all-- they wanted to gain control of it and change its characteristics at a given point.

"Why?"

"Some of the German scientists believed there were worlds parallel to our own that we were normally unaware of, yet that could be accessed if one knew how do it. Another way of describing what they were attempting was interdimensional travel. They didn't want to imagine such a door existed, they wanted to kick it in so they could access those other worlds!"

Her gaze had become one of concern. "And did they succeed?"

"The Germans? We're not sure, but we think that although they made progress in their research, they never actually got that 'door' open. Of course ..." Markman's voice trailed off.

"Of course what?"

Markman grimaced. "A bunch of Nazis disappeared after 1945. Some of them could be traced, some of them resurfaced in other parts of the world. But some of them ... never seen again. I don't know if you ever watched the original Star Trek series on television ... anyway, there was one episode in which the characters encountered a world modeled on the Third Reich. I can assure you that several figures in the community were highly incensed when that episode came out. No one believed the producer and writers came up with that on their own ... there was some kind of leak regarding the analyses of just what the Germans had been able to accomplish with their space-time research."

She shook her head. "I don't like where this discussion is going."

=5=

a reply to: F2d5thCavv2

Still chugging along nicely! I'm all caught up and hoping for more. I love the Star Trek reference.

a reply to: Encia22

Thanks for the encouragement, Encia.

I may need your help later on when I try to devise a reasonable ending for all this!

Cheers

=6=

When Markman arrived at the office, his division chief was waiting for him in his cube.

"Hi Boss!"

She scowled. "Good morning. I need your help. I got a call at oh-dark-hundred that we have a VIP coming today and I have to brief him on that ... what did you call it, U-TARP?"

"OOPART".

"Right, the OOPART document that NARA sent over. Apparently, a SENTCLAVE already looked at it and returned a 100 per cent confirmation. So, we can start here. Why does a group of asocial types seeing colors mean anything to us?"

Markman couldn't resist a half-smile. The first time he had heard about "Sensitives Conclave", he was skeptical as well. "Technically, the SENTs are not asocial but autistic, and not just any autists, but a very small percentage of their population who happen to have a unique ability. After OOPARTs were detected, we realized we had a Hell of a problem -- how could we confirm they were truly anomalistic and not just the product of someone's faulty memory? By chance, one of our operators had an OOPART on his person when he encountered an autist he knew. The autist wanted to know why the OOPART document was glowing with an odd color. Except it wasn't, only the autist, who happened to be a SENT, "saw" the color. Well, that guy was very well examined and the conclusion was that he had an unusual set of physical and mental characteristics that only occur in something like one-one thousandth of the autist population. It took a couple of years, but a collection of SENTS was identified and ... eh ... persuaded to perform services for us. The 'conclave' is just having a group of them individually examine a suspected OOPART and to tell us what they 'see' in terms of color. We look at the individual reports and determine if a majority of them are seeing the same color."

She sighed. "Okay, Markey. The meeting is at ten-thirty. I want you there."

=6=