From what we could make of it, before it left, the alien ship was at least partially organic. As if the mechanizations of the craft had grown, just the same as an insect grows an outer shell, or a finger growing out from a hand.
The ship interacted with our soil, with our atmosphere, in ways we couldn’t anticipate, and most likely will never truly comprehend. The area they touched down upon is considered by some to be too dangerous for explorations. Still others argue that the treasures that could potentially be found within are too valuable to be ignored.
The ship was only on earth for a few days. Seventy-five hours and thirty-two minutes. And after it left, we discovered that the area the ship had inhabited had been altered.
Extra Terrestrial Terraforming, they call it. ETT.
The region is surrounded by a perfect cube of what appears to be solidified smoke, sixteen point six kilometres wide on every side. Located in the middle of the Canadian Shield, Northern Manitoba, about a hundred kilometres north of the Sand Lakes Provincial Park.
That means it’s an easy enough space to contain. If anything, the real difficulty is in getting folks out to it. All the various scientific and military groups who have taken an interest and insisted on being allowed a presence. A whole little town had to be built to house them all. With a population of two thousand and sixty-three souls, the place is known as Jump-Point City. A little joke, as it’s the jumping-off-point into the great unknown that is the Site itself.
Site A. The point of contact.
But what’s inside, that’s what everybody wants to know.
…
There’s a little Native community not far from The Site. That’s where I live. I’m not Native, but my half-brother is, and he’s the one who got me up here. The rest of the community tolerates my presence, though I am seen as something of a strange and not entirely welcome outlier.
That’s where I live, and for some money, I’ll take people inside. Inside the Site.
That’s right. I’ve been in, and out again. I’m one of the very few.
Maybe sixty people have been inside Site A. Of those, about thirty have made it back out. Only ten people have been inside Site A more than once.
I have been inside Site A thirteen times.
I practically have my own key. Not that there are keys, but you know, if there were, I’d practically have my own.
For money, I take people in and out of Site A. Most of the money I get, I give to the Native community I’m living with. It makes my presence there a bit more palatable to the locals.
…
It is not easy to get into Site A.
First you must make your way past all of the human barriers. The guards, the dogs, the cameras, the sensors, the tripwires, the fences, the barbed wire, the razor wire… and then of course there’s the landscape itself. Mainly rough rocks dotted with a few haggard trees. No shelter. Nowhere to hide.
But really, it’s not such a big deal. You do it once, you can do it again. Sooner or later it’s like riding a bike. It’s always tough on the new folks, but that’s what I’m there for. To guide them through it.
Where it gets real dicy is when you get past all the human blockades, and make your way up to the wall itself. Site A is entirely enclosed within walls that reach up into the sky, and down into the earth. It’s a cube, we assume, with half of it above ground, and half below. There’s a plain flat roof across the top, and again, we assume something similar at the bottom.
The walls are made of swirling brown smoke that’s as dense as stone, but only at first contact. With a bit of work, you can usually squeeze your hand into some sort of a nook, or a fissure, in the seemingly solid surface, and before long, you’ll find yourself squirming through the wall like it’s soft cheese. The walls themselves are only a few feet wide, so it doesn’t take long to get through. So far as I know, only one person has ever died within the wall, and that was from asphyxiation. Got stuck. Couldn’t breathe. I was there for it too. I have no idea why they couldn’t make it through. But Site A has a tendency to interact with different people in different ways.
…
Inside.
Yeah. I’ve been inside.
I’ve seen it. I know it, as much as anybody can know any place that’s not their home.
That place. I don’t know what it is. But I know what it isn’t. And it isn’t here. It might look like here, it might rotate around the sun with the rest of the earth. But it’s not here. It’s somewhere else.
The light inside Site A has an oily brown quality, from being filtered through the outer walls. But the plants that grow there don’t seem to mind. The place is like a jungle, a rainforest. Lush vegetation full of flowering blossoms and crawling with luminescent lichens and mosses. The colours remind me of video games in the nineteen-eighties, or more specifically, like being in an arcade at the mall.
You remember arcades in the mall?
Those weird little caves with dim lighting and black walls, the sound of all the machines screaming at once, the lights of the games reflecting off the glass monitors of all the other games, and the pinball machines only old folks played. Such a strange space, so alive and dead at the same time. It was like everybody was nervous, or focused. Maybe that was just me. Every minute costs quarters, and what do you do when those run out? This is all you get, and then you gotta go home. And of course everybody was smoking back then.
Smoking indoors. Smoking in a mall in a darkened space where children played. Little kids and teenagers tripping over each other. A weirdly ominous underlying threat of potential harm. Or even just a hassle.
That’s how it feels inside Site A. Like you’re a little kid all alone in the arcade at the mall. Everything feels like it was designed for somebody - something - slightly larger and smarter than you are. Than we are. Our whole species. It’s spooky, is what it is. Spooky as hell.
Site A feels to me like some sort of organic computer processing plant. Like literally a plant, that’s also a machine, growing into the space it inhabits, converting a little piece of our ecosystem into what it needs to be itself. By that theory, it might mean that the whole thing is growing smarter, as it grows more whole, day by day.
I imagine that. I can’t say it’s true. I can’t say anything in there is true. I’ve seen glowing bugs disappearing into folds in the air. I’ve seen pods of fish-eggs growing in the weeds only to hatch into swarms of flying spiders with faces like hungry jackals.
I’ve seen some shit. Don’t try to tell me what I have, or haven’t seen, or what it might, or might not mean. I’ve gotten people in and out of Site A, alive and dead. How many other people can say that? Six or seven at the most.
Jenny, she’s not bad. Kind of an asshole, but you have to be pretty hardcore to pull off these trips. There’s no margin for error, we’re playing with live ammo and no safety net. When you hit the shit inside, Jenny always says, all you can do is start digging and hope you’re facing up. If you’re going to lead people through there, you gotta be able to take charge.
You go in without your wits about you, you’re not likely to come back out again, or maybe you just won’t come out whole. I’ve seen folks leave big pieces of themselves, back inside Site A. Hands, arms, legs, or more personal parts, like aspects of their own identity and ego. There was one woman who came back out without a name. It was just gone. She’d certainly entered with one, but by the time we’d come out, some sixteen hours later, neither she nor I could remember what it was, and I’m told she never did. I guess they could’ve checked the records, her ID, but that didn’t really matter. What mattered was that it was lost to her.
Another guy came out exactly whole, just the same as he’d been before, but he’d lost every single memory of his family. His wife and kids. They were strangers to him now. Then all his hair fell out and a week later they had to lock him up in a mental health facility, for trying to cover a municipal building in gravy. It made no sense, but of course, it wasn’t supposed to make sense.
Nothing makes sense about Site A. You travel far enough, look hard enough, you’ll see all sorts of natural laws being broken. Fires burning underwater. Plants writhing across the ground like snakes. Trees that weep tears of blood. Birds that migrate through dreams.
It’s dangerous in there. Gravity works differently, so you can’t just go wandering about blindly. You have to feel out the space around yourself. And everything is always shifting. The visible landscape, and the invisible web of connections that exists between everything, like deadly gossamer strands tying together the universe on a subatomic level.
You wander into one of those patches from the wrong angle, and they’ll dice you up like Christmas dinner, hairline fractures splitting your skin and bones on a cellular level.
You gotta watch out for yourself, in there.
Or pay to have somebody like me watching out for you. Watching your back, and your front. Going ahead, telling you when it’s safe to proceed, and getting you out alive. Or at least in one piece. Or at least nearly in one piece.
Honestly, given the odds, I’d say most anybody who makes it in and out even once is doing pretty good. And with me, it’s not really down to luck anymore. I’ve just figured out my place in it all, like an ant that knows how to crawl around an engine block. I’ll do okay. Until the day I don’t. And even then, there won’t be a mess. I die inside there, nobody’s gonna be getting me out. I can tell you that much for certain.
And there’s a thousand ways to die in there. Not just all the ordinary ways we’ve got out here. In there I’ve seen poison clouds of gas moving like an anxious herd of deer across fields of shimmery steel weeds. One night, what we thought were the stars in the sky turned out to be some sort of hulking airborne beetle, with glittering fuses in its shell. The thing lived a day and a half, and then I found it in a deep ravine, its body at least kilometre long, now half-rotting, half-still alive, being consumed by a host of other ravenous creatures.
I avoided the whole grizzly scene, but you wouldn’t need the insight of a well-travelled guide to know that was the proper response.
So that’s Site A.
You want in, you want out? It’s fifty grand up top, and fifty on the other side. I know we don’t have to do it that way, but that’s how I do it.
It’s a literal once in a life-time experience. If you can handle it. And if you can’t, I’ll do my best to make sure that your remains are safely shipped back to your family or designated place of burial, and cover that cost myself.
It seems only fair.