The man in a simple gray robe was standing on a hill giving a speech to the small crowd below him. He wasn’t speaking loudly but everyone in the group was carefully listening to him talk about those who are blessed. His speech was in Aramaic and as the people listened their eyes grew brighter and their voices would quietly repeat some of the things he had said. The man’s expression seemed calm and somewhat solemn but every once in a while he would glance up at a specific point in the air above the crowd. Somehow it was as if he was aware that across time and space there was a hidden watcher. When he finished his sermon he nodded to his followers, gave what might have been a slight nod to that point in the air then walked down from the mount.
* * * * *
I was relaxing with a soda and chips in front of my wall of monitors looking at the central screen to a plane flying in a rainy sky. These dozen monitors mounted on the wall and their cameras was my first major purchase with Hector’s money. It looked like something from a space launch control center and I loved it. Strangely enough it didn’t raise any eyebrows when I brought it. This type of monitoring setup was common for security rooms and several companies offered it. A quick search to find a small company with money problems followed by a phone call with an offer to pay in cash got a complete setup. The company was happy since it technically wasn’t illegal to sale it that way. They didn’t even need to ship it since the client (me) offered to come pick it up. There was some alarm at the company when the shipment disappeared with no record of pickup but I made sure to confirm I got it with them so it was marked as a paperwork error.
Hawk has had no problem opening multiple portals to the cameras at the same time. So far I couldn’t find a limit to how many or how far the portals could go. Something I would need to have a long conversation with hawk about. With each monitor showing the view through a different pinhole portal the wall display was incredible. The large main monitor in the center was the primary one for what I was currently focused on but the others allowed a more casual monitoring. I really didn’t have a good reason for so many but it was so cool looking. With a comfortable gaming chair in front and a refrigerator full of snacks I was now ready to seriously start doing some things but first I needed to test it out.
On the center monitor a south bound Boeing 727 was being tossing around in the storm when suddenly the aft door opened. Shortly after a man could be seen jumping out into the darken rain swept skies. The man was struggling and screaming as he jumped but after the chute opened he stopped. Strangely, as wind and rain pushed against his face and the parachute rocked severely back and forth the man could be seen to now be laughing and shouting. His pose and expression reminded me of that guy standing at the prow of the ship yelling he was king of the world. As the ground approached the man’s expression started to change. He started struggling with the guidelines of the chute. He looked like he was trying to avoid the forest below and land in the river instead. As the ground got closer it became obvious, he wasn’t going to make it. The man started shouting louder and kicking his legs as the trees got closer. With a crash he broke through the upper branches and fell to the forest floor below. He almost made it being only 20 or 30 feet short of the river bank.
A few hours later dawn broke, and the man could be seen awake and struggling. It was obvious that he had broken his ankle and his left arm looked dislocated. He eventually managed to get out of the harness and craw to the river for a drink. A few days later the man known as DB Cooper final gave up the struggle barely a hundred yards from where he had landed. He closed his eyes for the last time with his hand fisted around a stack of money. All alone except for the animals and one pair of human eyes watching from another time.
I quickly asked Hawk to stop showing the most recent scene and shut down the video monitor, there was no reason for me to watch the final few hours of DB Cooper. It looked like the FBI was wrong again; the infamous D.B. Cooper (real name Frank) was able to land with the parachute in the storm after all. He just couldn’t survive his injury and the hike afterward. This was the last mystery I was currently going to check. After watching thirty-seven of the world’s 100 most famous mysteries (Internet list) I now knew the answers to what really happened in all of them. Most were boring but a few were totally a surprise. Who would have thought that Jimmie Hoffa would actually end up in the absolute last place anyone would think to look for him and what the famous Loch Ness monster really was, Wow! Roanoke Island was a bit sad though, all that trouble because of a simple misspelling and Sir Walter Raleigh’s inability to count.
A lot of the more famous mysteries did end up being pretty mundane. Like the Mary Celeste just being a case of ergot poisoning from the moldy bread that the cook served to everyone. Or the Oak Island money trap, a spiteful creation of a nasty merchant who just didn’t want anyone to get his money after he died. I had spent the last two days finding the answers to all the puzzles and mysteries I had heard about growing up. A few were surprising but for most the explanations really weren’t that interesting. There was one very odd thing that showed up was when I tried to check out the South Fork Bridge reopening. Hawk wouldn’t move the portal closer to the crowd. He kept it pretty far back and refused any attempt I made to get him to move closer to that man. When I tried asking it why all it would say is “avoiding temporal discontinuity” with no further explanation. A real puzzle when he said it since Hawk has already told me temporal travel was not possible. I now had a new mystery about him to wonder about.
Hawk was showing more and more independence in its actions it seemed to me. It was definitely being more helpful in anticipating what I wanted. With D.B. Cooper incident I just gave Hawk the GPS coordinates of the Portland airport and the date and time to requested a portal to it. Hawk on his own focused on the right plane then followed it and later D.B. Cooper without any direction request from me. Its voice also seemed to be changing a bit, still odd but fewer monotones. I was starting to think more of it as a person. It was now a “he” to me instead or maybe a “her”. I’m not positive which and he wouldn’t say so decided to go with “he” for now. Hawk still wouldn’t initiate any actual conversation by himself without some kind of previous direction but he would reply to my conversations in more detail.
Just then Hawk spoke out “Samantha is approaching”.
I was expecting her to show up any day now and my fancy wall display would be hard to explain. I knew she would eventually see it so I came up with an excuse/plan for it. Telling Hawk to switch to visitor mode I brought up a word processor on my laptop with a partially written article on artificial reef creations before sending it to the main central screen.
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Right on schedule as there was a knock on the door with Sammy’s cheerful voice shouting “Daniel, are you up?”
Sammy then barged in without waiting, a smile on her face as she looked across the cabin at me. The smile turned to an “oh” as she suddenly saw all the monitors behind me.
I smiled back and said “Hi Sammy, whats up?”
“What” she said, after a brief pause she pointed at the displays and said again “What’s that?”
I quickly explained that it was for video research on my writing as I pointed to the different environmental scenes on the screens. I could see a small frown on her face as she doubtfully accepted my explanation that it was for research. Samantha was not stupid far from it, she was just bit naïve. After a few moments of looking at all the monitors her frown turned to a small grin. She must have noticed one of the monitors was displaying a beach scene with young women in bikinis playing volleyball and another had a video game up.
“Sure, it’s for research” she said with a bigger grin on her face
Using an embarrassing lie to hide a secret and then surrounding it with an unbelievable lie is something I learned from Area 51. If it works for the government I thought it would also work for me.
I had a nice time talking to her about her day and what she wanted to do when she graduated high school. She wasn’t sure how to go about it but she really wanted to take care of animals, maybe become a vet. Something I fully encouraged her to do. Knowing her and her grandma’s situation I made it a point to mention all the financial ways to afford college. She was concerned about the thought of leaving grandma alone but the nearest veterinarian school from here was too far too be commuting. After a nice talk and the sharing of snacks she had to leave. I walked her out the door to her horse. As she was climbing into the saddle she looked back at me and with a smile said “maybe next time you can show me how to play those video games”.
With a now satisfying smirk on her face fully confident that she had gotten my measure she rode off. I watched her as she disappeared down the trail feeling somehow pleased that she felt that way about me. With that pleasant thought I turned around and went back to my monitors. Time to get to work, to quit looking into the past and focus on more recent things. Besides there was something about looking at actual history on the monitor that made the wonder fade after a while. It was starting to feel like I was watching a movie or a reenactment video. All those years of looking at those shows and videos made me somewhat inured to the actual wonder of watching past events.
However there were a few things that shook me badly like seeing actual religious events. The few I saw didn’t quite match up with what was commonly recorded. Given people’s inability to handle the truth when it conflicts with their belief and what lengths they might go to about it I decided that these things should be left buried in the past. I decided that from now on all religious events would be avoided. Just the thought about seeing the crucifixion or recording the words of the apostles and what that would do to the world made me shudder. It was better if it remained hearsay and left to people’s faith to know. With that decision made I could finally put aside the image of that man on the mount and how he seemed to look at me.
Avoiding religious events still left a lot of questions of the past to be answered. Just thinking about being able to resolve all the old arguments about what did and did not happen in history was great but not something I would use change the world. Changes could happen but not in a nice way that is. I wasn’t naïve enough to think I could convince anyone of what really happened during the 2020 presidential election or the first moon landing no matter how much video evidence I could post about them. The uses of AI deep fakes were now so common on the internet that video evidence was becoming useless. I did still take pleasure in knowing it myself and who knows someday I might post all the videos on the web and see if anyone outside of conspiracy nuts believe any of it.
I finally was ready to take a break from peeking at the past and focus on other things. Much as the past still had a lot of interest to me so I knew I would eventually be back looking at it but for now on to more important things. I had decided on three initiatives I would focus on first. I know it was biting off quite a lot but I couldn’t hide out in this cabin forever. I was also doubtful I could do it all by myself but I was starting to think that Hawk might be a lot more capable then I thought. Lately he seemed to do what I needed before I could even ask him. He also seemed to be encouraging me to ask questions and talk to him like he wanted me to find out more of his capabilities. I just needed to learn what the right questions to ask were. This was particularly useful when I was trying to find a point in the past. I spent all morning last week trying to follow the Mary Celeste on her final voyage only to have Hawk immediately jump to the right time and location of the incident while I was eating lunch.
The first initiative I was planning to work on was missing kids. Searching the past from the point they went missing to the present would seem to be easy to do but the numbers made it unrealizable. In this country alone there were over 840,000 children reported missing each year. Most don’t make it to the milk carton for one reason or another but the ones that do still number in the thousands. I had to limit it to a more reasonable number so I decided to focus on stranger abductions. Later I might look at the family abduction and runaways but not right now. Figuring out which parent should have custody or if a runaway was better leaving was more of a judgment call and would involved a lot of time for each. So I had to figure out how to trace all those kids and then to tell the authorities but do it in such a way they would all think it was someone else’s doing.
The second initiative was pollution. Like the missing children I would need to focus on a smaller element of the pollution problem to start. I remembered watching the Olympics when they were in China and all the comments about the smog. The Chinese government did shut down the factories for a bit to try to get the air cleaner but it was barely an improvement and only lasted for a few days. With that memory I decided to focus on coal and the factories that burn it. Not that I wanted to stop the factories just get them to follow their own regulations. Most countries have regulations on air quality for their smoke stacks but from what I could tell they seldom follow it.
The last initiative was stopping species extinction. This was going to be the hardest to do anything about. Over 500 vertebrate species are believed to have gone extinct in the last 100 years. This was mainly due to habitat destruction, overhunting, and pollution. Any real progress with saving species might be impossible since the key problem was human population growth. Current population of earth was over 8 billion and should break 10 billion by 2050. There simply was no room for the animals.
With my stomach growling I decided to take a break and have some dinner. Looking at my collection of canned food I started to have second thoughts about dinner. After a moment I started to notice a tasty sent in the air. Looking around I noticed a basket sitting on my kitchen table. It wasn’t there earlier so it definitely had to come from Sammy. Seeing the fried chicken inside I realized her grandma must have known about the food and even helped prepare it. I suddenly started to think I might actually have a chance with Sammy. Maybe I should pay a visit to their place tomorrow. I could use the excuse of returning the basket.