A noise drew Turner from the dark place he inhabited, a world that seemed comforting in the absolute absence of stimuli.

His eyes had been open, yet they had been blind to everything in the room; it was as if he only now understood what he was seeing. He blinked his eyes as they watered from the strain of staring.

Thoughts filtered through his mind in random flashes that made no sense. He was in a house, but he could not remember why he was in this room with computer equipment and monitors.

Still, he had a sense of himself. He knew he had been a soldier with the type of decorations earned in combat. Somewhere in his past, he had worn the oak leaves of a major and commanded troops.

Staring at the computer screen, he gathered the threads of knowledge that existed, then observed his surroundings. A gun lay on his lap. There had been danger, obviously, but what was he doing?

The vision of a strange underground room passed into his mind. A place where he and other men of his nature had plotted a mission that would disguise the changing the face of the world.

Other men stood in the background watching the work and approving the final decisions, men who dressed in the expensive suit of the Washington Beltway and walked the halls of power.

The reason for those meetings was at the tip of his memory. He could almost hear the reports he had given to the suited men, who sat silent and immobile. He could see their faces as they sat emotionless, no hint of their thoughts on their faces as he proposed a flamboyant plan to... what?

Always surround a lie with truths. That maxim printed in large script and hung on the wall of his office. The efforts at the house had to do with a lie protected by truth.

He lifted the gun and looked at the cold metal. He suspected they had not come here to kill someone. It was an effort at the misdirection of public attention. It was a public relations job that had gone wrong.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Touching the keyboard of the computer, he erased the screen saver and looked at the data on the screen. Camera location icons were to one side, while a mission clock counted in the upper corner. They had been at the house for over ten hours. Below the mission clock was a counter that displayed dead time. Two and a half hours of missing time.

Dead time. Time wasted while he had been comatose. He was not sleeping when he came to consciousness. His eyes still hurt like hell. He had been in some kind of trance.

He searched the mission directory and found a page that divided observation and event initialization into subcategories.

A flashing icon caught his eye. The words ‘danger signs’ printed on a small rectangle with a blinking red background.

A quick touch of the mouse and the screen changed to report the dangers. A log of radiation detection levels scrolled onto the screen with a danger level alert. The radiation had been spiking for the past several hours but had gone into the danger zone a few minutes previously. While there was a health risk from the brief exposure, the levels had returned to an acceptable zone and were once again tolerable.

A second danger annunciation noted the stress paced on the house from an outside force, the equivalent of a ninety-mile an hour wind. The force had come from the northeast within a duration of two seconds. It seemed more like the result of an explosion, maybe a low order nuclear detonation if he factored in the radiation spike, but the timing was wrong. The wind had hit the house over an hour ago.

He looked at the gun again. They could have been under an attack.

Turner paused. That was the third time he had thought of the house as they. Part of his mind must know there were more people in the house, a subconscious redirection of his thinking.

A noise had woken him. Perhaps someone tried to contact him?

He was not a man to frighten easily, but the comfort of the room seemed to hold him in a tight grasp. He did not want to open the door and see what was waiting for him upon the exit of his cocoon.

It would be the height of stupidity to open the door before he understood the situation.

Returning his attention to the computer, he looked for a log that would explain his presence in the house.

It was a strange thing to be rebuilding his self, searching for minor glimpses of his personality and mission in the words on a computer. It was all he could do for the moment. Underlying it all was a sense that he was in a crisis and time lost would be unforgiven.