CHAPTER 6
The library wasn’t far. They stopped only to get a motorcycle helmet. As Jack walked through the store, he heard his mom encouraging him to pick the safest option. To be responsible.
He settled for one that matched closest to Arcee’s emerald hue. If they were partners in this thing—whatever it was—then he figured they should coordinate their uniforms, at least.
“Partner?” Arcee remarked acidly. “We’re not partners—you, Jack, are a liability.”
After that, the ride to the library was much more awkward, and leaving Arcee in the parking lot didn’t seem like the worst idea. He had the impression of stepping on a landmine, and only not getting his legs blown off from sheer luck. When he stepped off and headed up the library steps, she didn’t say a thing.
Inside, the library was vast. Somehow bigger in reality than it was in his high school memories. He was here to gather intelligence, to see if there was anything more scholarly about that Captain Witwicky and his expedition than Glen’s online readings of unclear veracity. He’d start with books, and then go from there.
Keywords—arctic, Witwicky, ice man, expedition. He assembled a list of titles and Dewey numbers—oh, how they had finally come in use—and made his way through the stacks. A book here, a book there. It turned out there wasn’t much on the supposed National Arctic Circle Expedition.
But there was something.
Whatever theory Glen had, whatever people he’d been listening to online, it was based on reality: there had been an expedition, and it had set sail in 1897, and it had returned. It had been captained by one Archibald Witwicky. He had left the country as a steady, experienced seafarer, respected by his crew, perhaps even feared—and he had returned as anything but.
The man didn’t even have a biography. Jack had to piece it together from half a dozen books. The catalyst for Witwicky’s decline was, it appeared, that the ice had collapsed under him, sending him plummeting into a cavern. It’d been a hard expedition, the sources said, and the fall was the straw that finally broke the old sea dog’s back. By 1898, he’d been thrown in the Boston Secure Hospital, which no longer existed, where he raved about having seen the face of the devil in an “ice man.”
And there was no more mention of him after that. An obituary listed his date of death as August 13, 1938. Forty years of madness, of not being believed. Of being locked away for being for the crime of seeing something he couldn't understand. Witwicky was survived by his son Clarence, a Missouri native. Cross-referencing that turned up a Herbert Witwicky, who’d also lived in Missouri. Jack jotted down the names. It wasn’t much, but it was something.
Then, he went looking for other sources.
According to an account by Reginald Danco, Witwicky’s first mate, the expedition had been cursed from the start. The fact that Witwicky had come back raving and ranting about a giant ice man from the depths of hell certainly appeared to bolster his argument. But, there was something else, another detail, something not mentioned—the dogs had found something under the ice, had started trying to dig for it. That was when the ice gave way and Danco watched his captain plunge into the depths. When they hauled Witwicky out, he was already gone. It was possible that he’d just hit his head and broken his mind, sure.
But what if he hadn’t?
What if, Jack thought, he was just like him? Jack sat back in his chair and tried to imagine perceiving Blackout when cars were still ‘horseless carriages.’ When the combustion engine had been a novel concept. Could you be sane—too sane—to comprehend a giant metal machine, to understand it? Maybe. It still didn’t explain how the giant robot ended up underground, but it was something to go on.
September 7, Danco had noted. September 7, 1897.
Anecdotes weren’t data, but sometimes they were the best you got. If two guys said they saw a sniper’s scope in the distance, only an idiot didn’t stop to check it out. Not that anyone bothered to find data in the ravings of an asylum patient from two-hundred years ago, to try and investigate the claims of a devil-faced ice man. The ice collapsed, Witwicky hit his head, that’s it. The MH-53 had a bomb on it, it detonated—and that was it.
The sun was getting low by the time Jack was flipping through his last two books, both of which seemed more conspiratorial than consistent, his own Hail Mary play. The first mentioned that, in the 1970s, someone had scanned the region where Witwicky was said to have fallen and found no trace of any metal—but who said what he found was metallic? Then there was one book, one in Glen’s area of expertise, that mentioned a front page news story which was the source of the supposed symbols: “Arctic Explorer Alleges Ice Man Found.” The New York Journal. May. 1898.
“Yes,” Jack muttered. He hopped up, and headed straight for the main desk. The librarian glanced up at him. She looked about as old as his mum was, if not older, with a bright purple pair of glasses. “Hey,” Jack said. “You guys have digitized copies of newspapers, right? How far back do they go?”
“About 1800, although it depends on the paper in question—why?”
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“I’m looking for a copy of the New York Journal. One of the ones from May in 1898.”
“The New York Journal?”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “Why? Is that a problem?”
“I’m afraid you’re out of luck,” she replied, albeit with sympathy. “The New York Journal is infamous for never being digitized. I think it’s only preserved on microfilm over in Washington, DC. We could arrange an inter-library loan, but there might be a fee, and I can’t guarantee how long it might take to arrive.”
It was better than nothing.
“Sure,” Jack said.
The librarian typed away at her keyboard. Jack waited. He glanced at the window, half-expecting to see Arcee there, staring at him and tapping her foot.
“Which edition were you looking for?” the librarian asked. “It appears they have May 29, May 22, May 8, May 1...”
“Wait,” Jack said, frowning. “No May 15?”
She looked back at her monitor. “No May 15. Well, look at that.”
“Is that odd?” It felt odd.
The librarian considered that. “I wouldn’t say so. For a lot of these older newspapers, it isn’t unheard of for some of the editions to simply be lost to the dustbin of history.”
“Well, isn’t that a coincidence,” Jack said, mostly to himself.
“Excuse me? I didn’t catch that.”
Jack smiled slightly. “It’s fine. I’m pretty sure that’s the one I was looking for.”
“Well, I’m sorry I couldn’t help you further. Is there anything else I can help you with?”
He shook his head. “No. But thanks for trying.”
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He double-timed it down the stairs back to Arcee, tugging his helmet on. “What'd you find out?” she asked, once they were back on the road.
“Arcee, do you know what a conspiracy theory is?”
“Vaguely.”
“I don’t know about most of the stuff Glen brings up when he gets worked up about secret government projects, but there is something weird about this one.”
“Explain.”
So, he did. What he’d found on the Witwicky expedition, Danco’s account, the missing newspaper edition, all of it. His theory that Captain Witwicky hadn’t gone insane, that he’d just seen something he couldn’t comprehend. Arcee listened. He thought he heard her motor hum, as if in thought.
“There’s been no recorded contact between your people and mine,” Arcee said, setting a steady pace along the asphalt. “Until now, that is.”
“Could one of you have ended up in the Arctic?” It occurred to Jack that he had no idea how a motorcycle could arrive from space.
“Could have? Yes. But would have? That’s another question. Without adequate protection, the conditions there would result in almost any Cybertronian going into stasis lock.”
He heard it in her voice, however—the realization.
“Which would put them in just the ideal state to be found by an Arctic explorer,” Jack said. “Who tries to tell people what he found. Only for everyone to think he’s gone mad. So, he tries copying down what he saw.” His eyes fell to one of the odd markings on Arcee’s panels, her ‘tattoos.’
“Which means what?” Arcee asked.
“It means we’re stuck together for a little bit longer.”
Arcee revved her engine, and accelerated. He didn’t know if that was a good thing, or a bad one.
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Back in Maggie’s garage, Glen had been busy while Jack had been gone. He rolled Arcee in to the sight of two more laptops, a Burger King bag, and two empty boxes of donuts. “Someone’s been busy,” Jack said.
Maggie nodded, perched on a chair like that Thinker statue. “This is all so crazy,” she said. “What’d you find out?”
“Enough to think that this is bigger than we thought,” Jack replied. “I mean, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think Glen was right.”
“If you think Ice Man is something,” Glen shot back, “you’ve got another thing coming, my friend! I am on such a sugar high right now. My neurons are firing like you would not believe! I am seeing the pixels, man! The pixels!”
Maggie rubbed at her brow. “He’s been like this since lunch time.”
Jack blinked. “Jesus.”
“Enough,” Arcee said. “Tell ‘em, soldier boy.”
Maggie snorted. “I’m sorry—what?”
“She really likes music,” Jack said. But he ran through what he had found. Maggie nodded, taking it all pretty well for someone whose worldview had been flipped up like a set of pancakes.
Glen pumped his fist. “I told you, I told you! They know the truth, and they’re hiding it man, the government!”
“If Witwicky really did write everything down in a journal, that might’ve gone to his family after he died. There was Clarence Witwicky, who had a son, Herbert. Herbert Witwicky was over in Missouri, and he had half a dozen kids...”
Maggie raised her hand. “So you’re going to just, what, go and ask them for their great-grandfather’s journal?”
“It’s about as good as plan as I can think of, Mags,” Jack said.
“Right. Of course. I don’t even know why I asked.”
“Glen,” Jack said, “if you can track down some addresses, that’d make this a lot easier.”
Glen grinned, raised his hands and stretched his fingers, cracked his knuckles. “Man, addresses? What do I look like? I can probably get you their bank details.”
“Uh, that’s okay,” Jack said. “I’m not looking to commit financial fraud.”
“I’m just sayin’.”
Maggie cleared her throat. “Jack, could you come with me for a second? I’m thinking we should organize dinner, and the pizza joint always has trouble with my accent.”
He followed Maggie into the house. Once they were in the kitchen, she grabbed the menu for the closest pizza place, and turned to face him. “‘Soldier boy’, huh? So, nicknames—that’s cute.”
“It’s not like that,” Jack said, frowning.
“Good.” She paused. “I’m sorry, that came out wrong. What I mean is, this is big, Jack. Really big.”
“Maggie, I get it. Giant robots. Secret fight club. A mystery that goes back a hundred years.”
She shook her head. “It’s even bigger than that. This is, like, existentially big. Quantum mechanics big. Jack, what do you know about the dodo?”
“The bird?” He shrugged. “I know it went extinct. Madagascar or the Mauritius or something. I’m pretty sure it didn’t have anything to do with quantum mechanics?”
Maggie glanced toward the garage. “Just Mauritius, no ‘the.’ The dodo went extinct because it was a flightless bird. Like, the one thing birds are supposed to have. But it’d done just fine for itself on its own island. Then one day, they’re suddenly dealing with these things they never could’ve imagined in their little bird brains—us, humans. And not even a hundred years later...”
“They were gone,” Jack said.
Maggie nodded. Her expression was difficult to read. “And when I look at Arcee, I think about the dodo. They probably thought they were pretty fucking cool on their little island—until we washed up on their shores, with our ships, and our pets, and our need for resources. We didn’t even try to wipe them out, Jack. It just happened.”
Maggie’s gaze hadn’t wavered. “And if one of them’s been here for a hundred years—well, who’s to say it’s just the one? Because I think about that, and I think about what I’ve seen Arcee do, and what Blackout did... and I start feeling a lot like a flightless bird. One who wished she had herself some wings to escape what was coming.”