The Man in the Black Suit

Avery scratched his furred head in puzzlement, there had to be more here. Why did he always get three quarters of the way down the rabbit hole before he hit a dead end. No footage, no pictures, just a witness account from a man that might be crazy. At least this time he was sure he was on the right track. The man had been in Harrison Plaza when the Capitol building was bombed by an extremist group, such a tragedy that day was.

These anomalies all happened for a reason, he was sure of it. But why was there no surveillance footage? All the cameras near to where the man had been had malfunctioned and their data had been corrupted. This alone was proof enough to Avery that he was getting closer. If only he could talk to the man himself, but alas, the poor man had taken his own life shortly after the incident.

He shuffled through a few of the scattered documents on his old desk, other papers flung to the floor in his wild search for the one document he sought. He knew he was obsessing over this, but how could he not be? He might be close to uncovering the longest standing myth in all of Human history among others. ‘Well, one of the longest.’ he thought to himself grimly.

He gave a little shout of triumph as he pulled the document he sought. It was an old photograph, one of the kind taken with a mechanical camera, no electronics. It was one of the only photographs he had of the anomaly, at least from Earth’s history. He actually had another similar photograph from Sabith, the homeworld of the Swanith.

Avery looked again at the object of his fascination, the picture showed a snapshot some tourist had taken of the Pennsylvania countryside back in the year 2128 AD of the long gone United States of America, only moments before the end of the old world. The photo framed a picturesque scene, the background lit by the bright flash of nuclear detonations along the eastern coast of North America as the third world war came to its fiery conclusion. The woman in the center of the picture had a startled look on her face and her features were blurred as she turned to see the blasts over the horizon. The other few people in the crowd all seemed similarly affected, all that was, except one.

The old mechanical camera had captured a historic event, the end of the United States. The image was interesting to Avery for another reason though, on the far edge of the picture near the front of the crowd was a nondescript man. The man was bald and could have been from anywhere, his bland features and medium colored skin blending in with almost any culture and his age impossible to determine. His clothes were strange as well, while the tourists all wore casual clothing and hiking gear, this man was wearing a clean black suit and tie. His very nature is at odds with the whole scene. His hands were folded behind his back and his head was tilted slightly to the side as if curious, not alarmed.

One of the most disturbing things was the next image taken only heartbeats after the first as the panicked photographer double pressed the capture button. While the first image showed a total of twenty two people, the next taken less than a second later only contained twenty one. The man was gone, vanished into thin air. It was as if he had never even existed, not even scuff marks in the dirt to confirm his presence. But he had been there, the first picture had not been altered nor the second. One moment the man in the black suit had been there and the next he had vanished.

Avery had only one other image of this man, and it was disturbingly from an alien world light years from Earth and almost two hundred years later. It was a picture from the discovery of the Swanith, their first contact with Humanity and the Atraxses in the year 2348 AD or 0 PU. The picture was taken on an old style polaroid camera, apparently the Swanith photographer had been a fan of the classical and had been using an old hand me down camera to capture the event. It showed a large crowd of delegates arranged in a wide semicircle near a landing pad that was being touched by the first shuttle to reach the surface of their world. And despite the fact that no Human had yet set foot on the surface of the world, there the man was.

In the shadows of a structure to the far left of the picture the man stood. Impossibly in the same position, hands behind the back and head slightly cocked to the side. The sun glinted off the top of their bald head which just stuck out of the shadow. Moments later another picture was taken, the shuttle all the way on the ground and the doors opening, and the second picture was a single figure short.

It was impossible, and he didn't know why it had taken five hundred years for anyone to try and piece it together. There was even an old report that the man had appeared in a Druth Felman episode, but the records were impossible to find, the episode having been scrubbed from history apparently. Damn Union information censoring, it was a crime, but one he couldn't prove definitively.

He had discovered other secrets in his crusade for the truth; he had been particularly surprised to learn that Sabith was not the Utopian society that the Swanith projected it to be. The small avian aliens were considered by almost everyone in the Union to be a quite peaceful race, not prone to the violence and rage that others like Humanity, the Vinarfel, the Slaaveth and the Nerivith were. Humanity and the Nerivith especially.

No one liked a good scrap quite like those two, Humans thrived on violence, the danger literally activating their pleasure centers and flooding them with adrenaline, a stimulant more potent than any the military had yet to devise. The Nerivith on the other hand had the opposite reaction, combat seeming to calm their minds and send them into a quasi meditative state where their instincts took over, ice cold to Humanities fiery rage.

The Swanith liked to show the rest of the Union a facade that they were civilized and morally upstanding while in the background they held a secret as dark as any that the inexplicable Humans held. In truth they were just as corrupted and ruthless as any of the other warlike races. The reason their planet was such a peaceful utopia was due to the fact that they had exterminated all the large predators on their homeworld, destabilizing the biosphere of their whole world and nearly leading to a total ecological disaster that they narrowly survived.

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They had a chaste system, while those of the upper classes used and exploited those down below and so on till you reached a bottom class that was subject to the whims of all others. It was from this lowest class that recruits for their highly specialized assassin guilds were chosen. They used these child soldiers to infiltrate and destroy behind the scene while only showing delegates from other races the gold exterior of their predacious society. While the lower class were working, fighting, and dying for their masters, they profited little and the rich only grew richer. He wished in his heart that he could do something about it, but the informant who had given him the information had assured him he would be dead before the information spread to the right people. Killed by a Wingterror assassin or worse. So he kept it to himself, none would hear from him, not in this life at least.

The same man, on two different planets hundreds of years apart, and now the verified report from earlier that year during the bombing of the capitol building. Avery sighed and hung his head. He had hundreds of vague sightings and possibilities over the years that ranged from hearsay to myth. But he only had the two concrete pictures, though that evidence was damning, it was too uncanny and improbable to be taken seriously without more evidence. That's why he had taken to carrying an old mechanical camera with him wherever he went, if the opportunity presented itself he would not be found wanting.

He closed the notebook he was scribbling in and shuffled his papers back together. It was getting late and he would need to leave soon if he was to catch a ride on the unreliable automated public transportation. He put the papers and notebook away in the secret compartment in his office, no one would think to look there and he knew his crazy theories were safe from prying eyes. The historic studies building had stood for two hundred years and would likely stand for a thousand more, the perfect place to work and go unnoticed.

Avery locked his small office behind him and started down the long darkened hall, his padded feet made little noise on the ground as he shuffled along nervously. The hairs on his shoulders prickled and he snapped a glance over his shoulder, certain he was being observed. But the hall was empty, not a soul in sight. He chuckled to himself at his own show of paranoia and started down the stairwell to the ground floor.

He reached the large open main atrium and looked around. It was late at night and the room was deserted except for Earnie, the old Gre’vahn custodian that worked in his wing. He waved to the large man and got a tired wave in response, thus known, he exited the building and out into the brisk night air.

His thick fur insulated him from the chill and he breathed in deep, happy to be free of the stuffy interior. The other races of the SCU like it too warm for his tastes, all but the Slaaveth who also did not have any adverse effects to chill air due to their scales and cold blood.

He started walking down the sidewalk in front of the building and started to hum to himself quietly. It was a clear night and he looked up, though the light pollution from the surrounding city made it more difficult, he could make out the stars and the span of the milky way just barely. He smiled at the sight, it reminded him of his camping trips with his father when he was young.

Suddenly he stopped as the feeling of being watched came over him again, he looked around and froze in shock as he saw what looked like a dark figure watching him from the other side of the street, in an area where the street lamps didn't quite reach. Fumbling for his camera he took his eyes off the figure for a split second to pull it out of his waist pouch. As he looked up the figure was gone and he swore. He took three steps out into the dark street and then stopped as he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. He slowly turned and saw the same figure further down the road to the side of the street, this time illuminated in the light.

Avery gasped, it was the man, clear as day and staring him full in the face from no more than thirty meters away. He raised his camera and snapped a quick photo. It was stored on the internalized film, he would have to take it home to develop it.

Avery looked up from his camera, the man was still there, he was about to walk towards the man and call to him when he suddenly heard the noise of a vehicle fast approaching. He whirled around and exclaimed with fear as an automated bus barreled towards him. It should have slowed, it should have sensed him, but for some reason the optical sensors were not working and the bus impacted Avery with bone crushing force. It smashed him out of the way and continued on as if nothing had happened.

On the ground to the side of the road was a limp figure, Avery had died immediately upon impact, his camera smashed and lying next to him, the film with his discovery lying on the ground.

**********

The watcher stood impassively and watched as the man died to the primitive machine. Such machines were reliable but so easily abused. It was a pity to see such a brilliant mind perish, but it was necessary. The watcher walked slowly and with measured steps, he approached the body of the man. As he reached it he moved his hands from behind his back, the fingers long and clawed. He slowly bent and retrieved the small round cartridge of film from the smashed camera. He held it up to the light and a slight smile cracked his face as he muttered three words quietly “Still looking good.”

The watcher stood and replaced his hands behind his back, still holding the film, and then was gone.

**********

The morning was cold and silent as a tomb. An old woman walked down her favorite sidewalk to a small bench where she liked to feed the small avians that roosted in the buttresses of the historic studies building. She slowed as she spotted a large mess of blankets along the edge of the road. Darn rapscallions, leaving their dirty laundry on the side of the road.

The woman walked slowly over to them to pull them out of the way when she stopped, her small bag of bread crumbs dropped from nerveless fingers and she sputtered. The bundle was not some other person's dirty laundry, it was a dead man. She screamed and tried to run but tripped over something and fell. As she crawled painfully to her feet she saw an ancient camera smashed to pieces on the sidewalk, her terrified mind never questioning why its film was missing. The woman dialed emergency services on her assistant and talked frantically to the operator.

Weeks later the small cramped office of Dr. Avery of Historic studies was cleared out, everything moved from the room. In the commotion none of the movers noticed the small irregularity in the wall near the farthest ceiling tiles. The room was marked as unoccupied and the door was locked as the building was not terribly busy, and would not be opened again for a long time.

End of Story