March 6th, 1990
Met the crew today at Jimmy Front Range’s mobile home/radio station.
Given the earth-shattering importance of Jimmy’s broadcasts, I was expecting something a little more… fortified. Satellite dishes. Camouflage netting. Maybe a bunker. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. The whole-hearted pursuit of the truth has never exactly made me rich, so it stands to reason Jimmy’s in the same boat.
Still, it was good to finally put a face to the man I’ve been corresponding with by letter and phone all these years. Jimmy’s got the look of a guy who’s slept in a lot of cars and been right about things nobody wanted to hear.
He introduced me to the crew he’s assembled.
Interesting bunch.
• “Knuckles.” A guy with obvious underworld connections. Doesn’t say much, which in my experience usually means he’s seen things he’d prefer to forget. Mentioned he got interested in hunting The Truth after a job went wrong and his partner got killed. Didn’t elaborate and nobody pushed it. Fair enough. Reminds me a little of a guy named Hunkle I went to high school with. I’ll have to ask him if there’s any relation.
• Claire of Arc. A dame with an odd accent who claims to be related to Joan of Arc. Says it like it’s no big deal. Note to self: ask her what she knows about the Knights Templar, the Fall of Acre, and the whole business with the Templar banking network that mysteriously vanished in the 1300s. Early evidence of reptilian infiltration into medieval power structures? Possible.
Also carries a sword like she means it.
• Cooter. Good ol’ boy with a van packed full of every gadget and gee-gaw you could imagine. Radios, scanners, infrared doodads, a microwave the size of a shoebox that he claims can detect “ghost frequencies.” Remarkably competent considering his constant state of intoxication. Reminds me of a CIA electronics tech I once met in Reno who insisted Elvis was alive and living in Paraguay.
Could be the same guy, honestly.
• “Mark Remillilard.” Almost certainly not his real name.
Claims he’s with the Time Police sent to our time to investigate something called a Class IV Temporal Anomaly. Says he was supposed to arrive with a partner named Danny, but they got separated in the time portal and he ended up here about a week ago.
In that same week he somehow managed to become an FBI agent.
I’m not saying I believe him.
But I’m also not saying I don’t believe him.
The federal government has been experimenting with temporal physics since at least the late seventies. The Montauk Project, Project Pegasus, the whole mess surrounding the Philadelphia Experiment—none of that ever got a straight answer.
So who knows.
Note to self: someone ought to make a movie about this someday. Call it Timecop. Get Jean-Claude Van Damme to star. They’d clean up at the box office.
• Chad. Describes himself as a “tech bro.” I have no earthly idea what that means.
Apparently went to Brazil with a group of friends to take ayahuasca, and woke up to discover everybody but him been devoured by cannibals.
I don’t know what ayahuasca is, but it sounds like the sort of thing Nancy Reagan had in mind when she said “Just Say No.”
Seems like a decent kid though. Handy with a shotgun.
Anyway, turns out Mark, Danny (wherever or whenever he ended up), and I are the new guys around here. One of the original crew is out of town at the moment. Nobody seemed too worried about it, which suggests either well-earned confidence or poor risk assessment.
We’ll see which.
For now, I’ll make myself useful, get a sense of the operation, and wait to meet the missing member when he gets back.
Turns out Jimmy already had a job lined up for us.
He keeps an ear on the police scanners day and night—says it’s the closest thing the modern world has to a truth feed. Over the past week he’s been hearing a lot of chatter about fender-benders around town. Nothing spectacular—no pileups or flaming wreckage—but an unusual number of them. More in the past week than they usually see in six months, maybe even a year.
Naturally nobody’s got a clue what’s causing it, so you figure you’d hear the usual parade of theories: bad weather, distracted drivers, teenagers, that sort of thing.
But that’s not what Jimmy’s been hearing.
The interesting thing—the thing that caught his attention—is that witnesses keep describing the same strange detail. During these accidents, it looks like the collision happens twice.
Cars hit.
Then they back up for a second or two.
Then they hit again.
That’s not something you see every day. Much less several times in a week.
Jimmy also mentioned that he’s got a cousin named Ernie who works at a place called the Stop N’ Slop. Ernie claims he saw one of these incidents happen right outside the store.
Eyewitness testimony being the gold standard of investigative work (at least until the witnesses start talking about aliens), we all piled into Cooter’s van to go talk to him.
Given that Cooter appeared to be working on his eighth beer of the morning, I insisted on driving.
No one objected.
Which, frankly, raised several additional concerns.
Turns out Ernie is some kind of spiritual cousin to Cooter.
Same general disposition, same relaxed relationship with reality—except where Cooter favors beer, Ernie appears to be a devoted student of THC-based philosophy.
Still, the man had a story.
According to Ernie, a guy walked into the Stop N’ Slop the night of the accident. Nothing special about him except that as he walked through the store he seemed to be flickering in and out of existence. One second he’s there, next second he isn’t, then he’s back again three feet farther down the aisle.
Ernie figured at first it was just the edibles.
But then the guy strolled over to the beer case, grabbed a six-pack of Coors, and walked right out the door without paying.
That’s when things got interesting.
As the guy stepped into the parking lot, he apparently caused one of the weird accidents Jimmy had been hearing about. Two cars collide—then time sort of winds backwards for a moment—then the cars collide again in exactly the same way.
Now I’ve heard some strange stories in my day.
But here’s the thing: the Stop N’ Slop had CCTV footage. And Chad managed to pull the recording right off the tape.
The image quality isn’t great—about as sharp as a Bigfoot documentary filmed through a snowstorm—but you can clearly see the guy. He’s carrying a side satchel, and every time he flickers on he gives off a faint glow, like static electricity in the dark.
While we’re studying the tape, Cooter wanders outside to poke around the intersection where the accident happened. Against all odds he comes back holding something interesting: an old USGS map of the Red Rocks Forest, just west of the city. Published in 1946. Looks like it had been folded and unfolded about a thousand times.
Someone had drawn a big “X” on it and written the name “Voss.”
No idea who Voss is.
But I’ve learned that when a mysterious name shows up on a seventy-year-old map in the middle of a case involving time anomalies and stolen beer, you write it down.
Probably not enough to convince the normies.
But I know what I’m looking at.
This is the real deal.
Which means two things.
First, there’s a time-traveling Coors Light bandit running around town.
And second—
Jimmy Front Range’s crew might actually be the closest thing this world has to people willing to deal with it.
For the first time in twenty years of chasing leads, I’ve got the uneasy feeling I might finally be closing in on The Truth.
Granted, it might be a truth involving time travel, stolen beer, and parking-lot physics violations.
But it’s a start.
We’ll work our way up to the Danish LEGO plot soon enough.
The next step was basic detective work.
We bought a map of the city and Mark started plotting the locations of the accidents Jimmy had heard about on the scanners. Sure enough, they seemed to cluster around one particular part of town.
While he was doing that, I headed down to the police station.
Turns out if you walk into a precinct carrying a large box of donuts, cops become surprisingly cooperative. I bribed one of the officers for whatever information they had about the accidents, letting her know the box was for everyone.
She kept the donuts for herself. Every single one. But she gave me everything I needed, so I let it slide.
When we added the official reports to Mark’s map, the pattern became obvious: fender-benders clustering around a single apartment complex.
Meanwhile Cooter and Knuckles had taken a different angle on the problem. They spent the afternoon visiting body shops around town to examine the cars involved in the accidents. Turns out Cooter goes way back with most of those guys, which smoothed the process out nicely.
They found something interesting.
The damage patterns on the vehicles told the same story witnesses had been describing: two impacts, one almost perfectly overlapping the other. First collision, then another one just inches away, like the accident had rewound and played again.
Mini time loops.
Which meant the glowing satchel guy probably wasn’t just passing through these accidents.
He was causing them.
So we headed out to the apartment complex and wouldn’t you know it—just as we were pulling into the parking lot, we saw one of the time skips happen right in front of us.
Two cars slammed together. Reality hiccuped. Then they slammed together again.
Standing right there in the middle of it all was our glowing satchel guy.
I took off running after him and probably would’ve caught him too, except every few seconds time would stutter again and throw off my stride. The skips were coming straight from the guy I was chasing.
Hard to pursue a suspect when the sidewalk keeps rewinding under your feet. He got clean away.
But Cooter managed to snap a few photos of him before he vanished. We’ll have to get those developed later.
Next we went inside the complex to start asking questions.
The apartment manager looked pale and unsteady. Turns out she’d been suffering from vertigo for about a week—ever since the accidents started happening.
When we asked, she mentioned one tenant who’d been acting strange.
A geology grad student from Colorado State up in Fort Collins named Brian Thompson. Apparently, he’d been a quiet, reliable tenant until about a week ago. That’s when he started muttering to himself and babbling about strange theories involving time, energy, and things nobody else could make sense of.
We asked what room he lived in. Room 324. We figured we’d better pay a visit.
Turns out Room 324 contained a bloated, decomposing body lying face down on the floor. Even better, the body belonged to Danny, Mark’s missing partner. Looked like he died by having his skull slammed against the wall four times in a row until it (the head) was nice and squishy on one side.
Right about then a couple of police cruisers pulled up outside. In retrospect we figured we’d spooked the apartment manager and she called them.
So Knuckles and I went downstairs to stall the cops while the others searched the apartment. I started explaining The Truth—the connection between the LEGOs, the Bilderbergs, and how Duplo blocks were clearly the next stage in world domination.
For some reason the officers decided I was mentally ill. No problem, I get that a lot.
While they were trying to sort me out, the others photographed the apartment. The walls were covered in equations—physics, mathematics, diagrams of space-time geometry scribbled everywhere like the work of a man racing the clock.
Which, considering the circumstances, he probably was.
Mark removed anything that might reveal Danny had been with the Time Police, then stayed behind to handle the police with the help of his FBI badge once they lost interest in me.
The rest of us slipped out the back.
That night we ran a two-part stakeout.
Some of us watched the apartment complex to see if Brian Thompson—or anyone else interesting—came back.
I stayed with Jimmy to monitor the police scanners in case more accidents started happening. Dinner consisted of cold cereal while Jimmy did his nightly radio broadcast.
Tonight’s topic was a lengthy explanation of how Saddam Hussein was going to invade Kuwait sometime in the next few months.
Jimmy’s a good guy.
But sometimes he really goes off the deep end with the conspiricizing, if you know what I mean.
Still…
After today, I’m starting to think the world might be a stranger place than even Jimmy realizes.
March 7th, 1990
Turns out nothing happened overnight.
We ran shifts all night—half of us watching the apartment complex and the other half listening to Jimmy’s scanners—but nothing out of the ordinary came through. No strange visitors, no more fender-benders, no temporal hiccups.
Just a quiet night and too much cold coffee.
By morning we figured the best lead we had was the missing grad student, so we piled back into Cooter’s van and headed up to Colorado State in Fort Collins to see what we could learn about Brian Thompson.
Universities are strange places. Full of very intelligent people who spend their time studying extremely narrow pieces of reality while ignoring the much larger forces clearly shaping the world around them.
Most of what we learned came from another grad student who had been collaborating with Thompson on some geological study involving limestone caves in the area. She explained—with the enthusiasm of someone who was really, really into rocks—that the local limestone formations dissolve unusually quickly because the groundwater here has a different chemical composition than in other regions.
Apparently, that results in faster cave formation.
She was really into it.
Personally, I couldn’t help wondering what might happen if people like her devoted that kind of energy to investigating how the elites manipulate the global population instead of rocks.
Still, she gave us some useful information.
First, the last time she saw Thompson in person was a month ago when he brought her rock samples from the field site they were studying. And that field site just so happened to be the same spot marked with an “X” on the old map the satchel guy dropped. I’m sure it was just a coincidence.
Second, the last time she spoke with Thompson on the phone—about a week ago—he sounded extremely stressed. According to her he was rambling about strange ideas involving time and energy and didn’t seem to be making much sense. He was talking about having found some sort of “anomaly” in a rock fissure and just as he found it, “something” of some sort came over him.
Third, the cave system they were studying lies within a few tens of miles of some old atomic test sites that the government still keeps off limits.
Make of that what you will.
Finally, she mentioned that Thompson had been dating a girl named Sara who lived down in Red Rocks.
We made a note of that.
From there we headed over to the university library to dig into the name “Voss.”
Turns out Voss had been a graduate student in the University of Chicago physics program back in the 1930s, working on early nuclear experiments. From there he was recruited into the Manhattan Project.
Which, as we all know, was just a convenient cover story for the government’s attempts to understand the Roswell incursion.
According to the records we found, Voss spent most of his career studying relativity, atomic energy, and the fundamental structure of reality. Several of his papers speculated that manipulating nuclear forces might allow the military to bend the fabric of space-time itself.
Which sounded suspiciously relevant to our current situation.
Armed with that information, we headed out to the cave system Thompson had been studying.
The place was remote and quiet. Limestone outcroppings everywhere, with narrow cracks and sinkholes scattered through the forest floor. Not long after we arrived, however, we started experiencing more time skips.
Nothing dramatic at first. Just the occasional moment where reality seemed to stutter—like someone had briefly pressed rewind on the world. Eventually we traced the disturbances to a fissure in the rock inside of a cave. And something inside the crack was glowing.
Before we could decide what to do about it, reality hiccupped again. Hard. One moment we were standing in the cave system and the next moment we were back at the apartment complex but our watches were all wrong. Time itself didn’t seem to agree with what time it was.
Just then, a couple of paramedics showed up, saying they’d received a call about injuries from a fight at the complex. Problem was… no fight had happened at the complex… yet… we figured the time disturbances had scrambled the call and brought them in early.
Not wanting to miss whatever was about to go down, we stuck around and sure enough, a little while later Brian Thompson showed up.
He was carrying the satchel and he was glowing. He didn’t look much like the quiet grad student the geology department had described. He was in some sort of frantic trance yelling at us. Something about how we needed to understand the nature of time. How there is no past or future—only now. How Voss had revealed the truth about reality. “Voss speaks to me,” he kept saying.
At one point I managed to grab his satchel. Turns out it didn’t contain any kind of time travel device—just pages and pages of equations scribbled in frantic handwriting. Physics, mathematics, space-time diagrams.
And taking the bag didn’t slow him down at all. Or stop that weird glow.
Somewhere during the past couple of days Mark had gotten the idea that strobe lights might disrupt the temporal effect. Something about interfering with whatever frequency Thompson was operating on.
He told Cooter to give it a try.
Cooter flipped on one of the strobe rigs from his van and it turned out Mark was right.
The flashing light seemed to confuse whatever was happening to Thompson. The time skips slowed down just long enough for the rest of us to move in.
Claire struck first. Her flaming sword caught Thompson across the chest, tearing a huge smoking cauterized gash from shoulder to hipbone. And I finished it from behind with the garrote.
The glow faded almost immediately and for a few seconds the world felt very still…. And back on the correct time. Which, after the past couple days, was a welcome change.
The medics, finally with something to do, got on the horn and called the police, and we figured that was our cue to make our exit. As we did so they rushed to Thompson’s side and started CPR, but we knew something they didn’t.
Once the glow was gone, so was Thompson.
Cleanup took a while. That time hiccup that brought us from the cave to the apartment building had stranded Cooter’s van out in the middle of nowhere, so Claire used something she called “Angel Wings” which is most definitely not what it sounds like.
One moment she was standing next to us, the next she basically vanished into thin air and reappeared somewhere out by the caves with Cooter’s car keys. She got in, drove the van back into town, and met us like it was the most normal thing in the world.
I’ve got to remember to ask her what she knows about the Montauk teleportation experiments and the whole business with the Philadelphia Experiment destroyer jumping through space-time back in the forties. Either she’s tapped into the same physics those projects were chasing, or she’s got access to something even deeper.
Also need to ask where she got the flaming sword.
Probably someplace a little more upscale than my usual shopping haunts of Kmart and Sears. I’ve been to my fair share of Blue Light Specials and never once saw a flaming sword on clearance.
I put the time waiting for Claire’s return to work doing some background research on Voss at the library.
Most of what I found confirmed what we’d learned at the university. Voss had done research in Nevada, the Four Corners region, and eventually right here in Red Rocks, where he apparently lived for quite a long time.
Interesting thing is, the local phone book listed two people with the last name Voss.
Turned out they were his children. Which might be worth following up on later.
And wouldn’t you know it—right about the time Claire returned with Cooter’s van was when Cooter himself got a call from his cousin. Or sister. Or ex-girlfriend. Possibly all three.
Hard to tell with Cooter.
Anyway, her name’s Becky, and she works over at the hospital and she’d seen something strange.
Talking with Becky and turning Chad loose on the hospital CCTV system showed us that a woman named Sara Marks had checked into the hospital complaining of a rash and confusion.
The rash was… unusual.
According to Becky, it looked like “the skin was all cut up,” and it was writhing on its own, almost like something underneath it was trying to get out. She said it looked like the skin itself was in the process of splitting open.
The dermatologist—Dr. Miller—was called in. Said he’d never seen anything like it. Took a biopsy and promised to look into it.
But before the psychiatry team could come talk to her—and don’t even get me started on shrinks and the role they play in maintaining New World Order social compliance programs—Sara pulled out her IV, wandered the hospital looking for a way out, eventually found the cafeteria exit, and made herself scarce.
And ever since then Becky’s been hearing whispers that say:
“Follow Voss.”
I’ve got no idea what to make of that.
But I do know one thing about missing persons cases – the first step is always the same. You go talk to the family.
So I took the crew over to Sara’s parents’ place.
Nice folks. Middle class. Seemed genuinely worried.
They told us Sara had never been in any trouble, held down a steady job at the roller-burger place, and things seemed to be going well with her and Brian Thompson. The two of them liked to go hiking together, and while the parents couldn’t say for certain whether she’d been up in the Red Rocks forest with him recently, they said it wouldn’t surprise them.
Then about a week ago things started to change.
Sara stopped sleeping well and started acting anxious. Jumpier than usual. Erratic, even.
Then suddenly they didn’t hear from her for three days straight—even though she normally called them every day.
Next thing they knew the hospital was calling to say she’d been admitted… and then escaped.
And then we showed up on their doorstep asking questions about time anomalies and missing grad students.
They took that about as well as you’d expect.
So here’s where things stand.
We’ve got a dead grad student radiating time skips who thought he was speaking with a long-dead Manhattan Project physicist.
We’ve got a cave system sitting near old atomic test sites that seems to produce temporal distortions.
We’ve got a missing girl with something alive under her skin.
And we’ve got a hospital employee hearing voices telling her to follow Voss.
Which means we’ve got two immediate priorities.
First: find Sara Marks before someone else does. Or before she finds somebody.
Second: keep an eye on Becky, because people who start hearing mysterious voices have a tendency to go wandering into places they shouldn’t.
And if this whole thing really does trace back to Voss and whatever he discovered about the nature of time…
Then I have a feeling we’re only just getting started. But that’s fine. After twenty years of chasing conspiracies, it’s nice to finally have a case with some concrete evidence.
Now if I could just figure out where the LEGOs fit into all of this, we’d really be getting somewhere.