As he had said in his little speech before the crew, the mysteries and bad omens surrounding the Singing Road were plentiful. However, the facts were sparse, probably the sparsest he had ever seen for a mission. While he had those five bags full of reading materials, all of the truly indisputable information could be written on his hand. Those bags were full of testimonies, transcribed interviews, witness depictions, and all manner of reliably-sourced, but completely subjective data. And most of that data was conflicting. People said the phenomena happened exclusively at night, or just when visibility was poor, that the phenomena had to be targeted at them, that their encounter was random, that it looked like a bird… sometimes. Even the mortality rate was inconsistent. He had calculated the average to be 96%; there was also a 12% chance for no casualties, but that didn’t interest him. Eli didn’t exactly have a death-wish, but he hadn’t done all of this work to wind up with only a little blood on his hands.

There might have been small pieces of bone on D.Q.’s boots. They had left a breast-line shaped stain on his desk when she had left. Most of the stain had been dirty snow, which had melted into the papers. But there were a few leftover chunks. Most of them were gravel or other small rocks, however some of them were pale white. He pinched one of them for a better look. After some intense squinting, all he could deduce was that it was indeed white, and solid. If he put it under his microscope, he might have found that it had the crystalline structure of marble or some other white stone, and not the porous make-up of bone. However, it was late in the afternoon and he was too comfortable at his desk to unpack the microscope, and not interested enough to make the whole bone-marble debate into a metaphor for how exact methods in research helped cut through ambiguity. He’d find something else to equate the Singing Road’s phenomena to, when he was done reading.

Where would he start with this? He didn’t have enough time to skim through everything, and too much for only one binder. And he would sooner be forced to hastily re-pack than go up and talk with the crew to kill time. There wouldn’t be any time to himself once they arrived at the camp. Well, he was a Formers. Why not start with the literature of his people?

EP-S Dept. Case File 02 “The Singing Road” hadn’t been touched since it had first been given to him. He’d gone through it, made notes, and then started his own research. That habit had served him well whenever he had a new assignment. The binder exterior was three metal sheets held together with hinges, and the actual pages were also made of quarter-inch thick steel rectangles. The letters were indents on the sheets. Formers made their archival materials to last, and this was no exception. From what he had been told, these binders were printed directly from the order’s digital libraries and there were only a handful of machines in the world that could produce them. Compared to all of the worn paper and scratched out words that he possessed, the official binder was uncomfortably mechanical. Even the text read like it hadn’t been touched by human hands.

As he had hoped, there wasn’t anything in there that he didn’t already know. The main reason that he didn’t re-read these binders until the last minute was that he hated reading something that he had forgotten about. Everyone made mistakes, and he didn’t need to be reminded of them before an expedition started. Besides, surprises were always welcome. He did find a particularly handy distinction on the earliest reported event. This was from before the Singing Road was even considered a location capable of producing “phenomena”. The important takeaway was that Formers only had proof that a U3C operation had been ordered on I-94, not that it had been completed. The actions of U3C, also known as “Unprecedented Civil Collapse Coordination”, or “The Amoral Death-Throes of a Military Superpower,” were responsible for files 01 to 05 in Eli’s department. He knew that the Formers had a complete list of their operations, and was almost certain that it was impossible for someone to read it without crying at the absurdity. He found this nuance intriguing, as it left a lot of room for speculation. While the binder included the original command that had been issued to the military bases and pilots, it fell on his shoulders to see how well it had been executed. That would have to be where he started, and he already had an idea of who he should talk to for that…

“Am I intruding?” Asked Cone, after he was already halfway down the ladder to Eli’s room. It just occurred to him that he had over three quarters of the Roller to himself.

“I’m busy.” Eli said, trying to dismiss him.

“I see that.” Cone replied. This warranted Eli turning in his chair to face the merchant. The snow kicked up from the plow had not been kind to him, he looked like something was trying to paint him over in white. But he didn’t look like he had come down here just to warm up. And the shadows being cast from the hatch were too orderly to be made by trees alone.

“We need to talk.” Cone said.

“We can do that while I read, close the hatch.” Eli said. He put the Formers binder on the desk and pulled out one of his case-studies from over the summer. Cone sat in a chair to the left of his desk and glanced at the metal binder. Eli should have turned it so the cover reflected lamplight at him.

“You’re not chipped, are you?” Cone asked. This was normally one of the things that went wrong: people being too suspicious about his lack of an implant. At least he knew that Cone was too timid to try and check his head for surgical scars while he was asleep. Eli didn’t care to track how many times he had woken up to someone fondling his scalp, nor speculate all of the times when he had slept through those examinations.

“No. I don’t think I am.” Eli said, as he flipped through the binder. This had been the crew from that herding syndicate. He remembered the stench of shit from their surviving cows more than anything else. Their ship was designed to be flipped over when there wasn’t enough snow for their herds to pull it, and it was painted red like an old barn. He made a deal that he would help them move their stock to a nearby settlement in exchange for their testimonies and descriptions. Looking back, part of him wondered if he made that arrangement to spend time around animals again.

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

“That’s funny.” Cone said. Eli didn’t bother looking up to hear the accusation.

“I’ve never met a Formers who didn’t have a chip in them… isn’t that what makes you people so special?” Cone asked. Those people with the cows had encountered a phenomena as they were cross-cutting a section of planes. It was the only incident where there had been writing involved. The phenomena had detailed its terms in the cow’s blood. Eli had been ready to write the incident off as grimly imaginative bandits, but some of the mutilations were too… He didn’t have the word for it, but he had a strong feeling that this was a Singing Road phenomena. Feelings, yes. He’d written extensively about that elsewhere. Eli looked faced Cone as he groped for his next reading.

“And I’ve never met a guy named ‘Cone’ who didn’t have a pointed head… or an absolutely bizarre dick.” Eli said. Cone smiled.

“It’s short for ‘Silicone’ I’m the administrator for its refinement and transport. You know, my clan is the only group on the continent who can supply Formers with the purity they need to make new chips.” Cone said. Eli looked down at his new reading. This was just an old notebook with a few pages he had put markers in. Over his last expeditions, he had found that a good exercise was listing the most common emotions that interviewees described. Naturally, “afraid” and all of its synonyms were at the top. Below those, he found more exotic descriptors, like “despaired,” “anxious,” “hopeful,” and “complacent, like I stood accused of something and was just waiting for the punishment… and I was fine to wait until it was my turn… they were helping me to wait.” That quote had come from a sole-survivor.

“Do you know where those chips go?” Eli asked, now he was making eye-contact with Cone.

“Obviously not to you.”

“Nor my department.”

“What department is that?”

“Aberration Studies.” Eli said. Another reason that he had picked Cone, was that he knew this man scared easily.

“Aberration Studies?”

“We’re divided into four specialties. There’s the Internal specialists, who study phenomena in the Order itself, caused either by psychosis… or faulty hardware. The newly-created Swell and Deltan specialists— that’s self-explanatory. Then there’s the chemical specialists— they deal with unique toxic or radioactive spills.”

“What’s the fourth specialty?”

“Social. Myths, cults, urban legends, folklore, gods, monsters… I work with the supernatural.” Eli had honed that line to a devastating edge over the years. The real trick had been getting the order right.

“You’ve lost me.”

“Are there really gods and monsters?”

“Fuck no.”

“What are they then?”

“Stories and exaggerations.”

“But my order works in facts.” Eli said, spreading his arms out to all of the packed text around him.

“So they send you to places like this…”

“To find out what’s really going on.”

“You still haven’t answered my question. You do all of this work for Formers, so why don’t you have the thing that makes you a Formers?” Cone asked. He was more resilient than Eli anticipated.

“I asked this question when I was first recruited for this job. They told me that a chip wouldn’t be required for my work, so long as I was good at remembering and writing things down, and they also said it would make it more difficult for me to interact with remote populations… having a computer chip put through my skull and all.” Eli said.

“Could you have one put in if you wanted?”

“Sure… but I like doing the work without one.” He said. Cone nodded, and frowned a little as he looked at the metal binder on the desk.

“Some of the people up there were wondering, about that. Because all they know about Formers is that they have the chips in them. But they all like you… and I— I like you, but…”

“But what?” Eli asked.

“Well, I’ve been doing business with your order for almost a decade, and…”

“You still don’t trust us?”

“I still don’t… I just don’t know what it is that you guys… You all make me, uneasy… with how much you all seem to know… and how little you tell us.” Cone said. How long had that confession been brewing in him?

“You know what you’ve never told me? And what I find awfully funny?” Eli asked.

“What?”

“What a man like you, who’s done almost ten years of business with one of the most powerful factions in the world, is doing up by the Singing Road— especially one who’s as scared of it as you.” Cone frowned yet again.

“Well, it’s like you said. I started up that silicone trade, and for the past six years I’ve been bored with it… I’m bored with what I do and… everything, and I was about to start hating it. Then you came along, and… Eli, I’m 58 years old. I don’t want to die and say I was just a merchant who made sure the fucking shipments came in on time… I—” Eli raised his hand. He really didn’t want to hear this.

“Spare me the melodrama, it’s OK. We all want some adventure in our lives.” Now Cone was confused.

“You asked—”

“I thought there might be something else you wanted to do up here.” Eli said. Cone chuckled, but Eli could see that he was pissed enough to ask Pontius to run him over, or have one of the crew push him over the rails.

“You know, you’re an even bigger asshole than some of the chipped fellas.” Cone said as he stood up to leave. Eli kept smiling at him until he got bored of that and started reading again. Cone would be the first.

Now he was onto a sheet he had written on the major commonalities of the phenomena:

“All of the interactions indicate that THEY are animated to some extent. Many people have advocated that in hind-sight it might have just been an advanced siege machine, but mechanical experts have repeatedly stated that no machine they know of can move like the phenomena they saw. However, all agree that the phenomena are composed of an aggregate of mu—”

He heard the brake pads, or whatever the stopping mechanism was, screeching. Either there was something in their way, or they had arrived at the first point of interest.