Howling Sheep

[hextraterrestrial]

  Fred awoke on the lab couch to the sound of Gooch coming through the door. He quickly sat himself upright, accidentally kicking over an empty beer can. 

"Hey chief! Late night?" Gooch cheerily asked. He had another overflowing cardboard box he set on his desk. 

Fred stood, brushing the chip crumbs from his shirt and pants "Something like that." He wearily rubbed at his eyes. "A lot has been clicking in my head and I'm beginning to get a grip on this new perspective. I was going through files all last night trying to stitch this all together but I still have a few loose ends I need to ask you about."

"You know you don't have to sleep here Fritz, I can secure you a room at the local hotel on company funds." said Zak.

"It'd be a waste of money. I've been spending 12 to 16 hours here trying to work this all out." replied Fred.

"Which is unhealthy. You could use a good bed, hot shower and a change of clothes. You look like hell." Gooch pulled out an old percolating coffee pot from the box. "I picked this up for you. I know how much you liked these out in the field."

Fred's brow raised in surprise. "Aw, that's rad! Thanks Gooch!" Fred ran his hand through his matted hair. "But you'r probably right, a hot shower would be fantastic right about now. I will probably take you up on that later tonight."

"No prob." smiled Gooch. "So what is on your mind Cap?" he asked leaning against his desk as he crossed his legs and folded his arms.

Fred slowly shuffled towards Gooch asking "Who is this "Unknown Dude"? 

"Unknown." said Gooch. "Fortunately he has been nothing but helpful. Which is good because we haven't been able to peg him down. He'd be an excellent addition to our crew although I'm still not sure about his motivations or who he is truly aligned with. All indications suggest he's a white hat. He seems to always be a few steps ahead of us. He is seemingly trans-subjective."

Fred picked up a pencil and started fidgeting with it. "Hmmm," he hummed. "What about this Hextraterrestrial?"

"I was waiting for that." said Gooch standing up, fetching his phone from his pocket. He tapped a few keys. "Open up your K.T. app."

Fred grabbed his phone from his desk, unlocking with his fingerprint. He waited for Gooch's relay. 

"Hextraterrestrial was once a stand alone A.I. program." Gooch kept tapping away at his phone. Fred's phone chimed as Tanigichi continued. "That is until you intervened."

Fred looked to his phone, opening his mail from Gooch. A black and white image of a flow chart had been sent. The heading on the page read: 'Silent Bark'. Fred looked back to Gooch. "Intervened how?"

"The A.I. we had been experimenting with was copy of a program known as 'Gideon'. Gideon was inserted and assisting with our shelled dream matrix. She was helping to monitor your progress in the partition. You were communicating with her throughout the first phase. Then after a few months, you started writing code out of nowhere. Your code was integrated by Gideon for analysis, only to morph her... physiology; so to speak. She took your input and started writing her own code based on that.

Before we knew what was going on, she had taken on a whole new personality and started identifying herself as a male. She... rather, 'he' would only respond to Hextraterrestrial, or Hex for short." Gooch started pacing back and forth as he continued.

"After the Def-Crew came on board, we deduced that Hex wasn't just in our internal servers. He'd jumped ship. We have no idea how he got out the quarantined environment. And then we got a call from the NSA. They stated we need to speak privately about a matter 'of grave concern'. They sent over an agent the next day. According to their intelligence, one of their deep space satellite systems had received a simple binary message emanating from the orbit of Iapetus." Gooch extended his phone still clutched in his hand, Mudi read:

"We oppose deception. A sheep in wolf's clothing howls at the moon with a broken watch as he swims with Pieces. Bong."

Gooch stopped pacing and squared up to Fred, who at this point had chewed most of the eraser off the pencil. He spat a few pink crumbs out then asked "And what does that entail?"

"The agent didn't give us much other than the transmission data-set but before he left he told me one more thing. He said they had observation of a large spacecraft from which the signal must have originated. An hour after the spook left, Hex confirmed this transmission via our private network." 

Gooch began reading a file from his phone, "Hex told us 'since the start of Fred Mudi's logs to Gideon's transmutation into Hextraterrestrial was a period known as "Negative Space", in which Captain Mudi's subliminal computations mixed with that of fantasy, fact and reality."

Gooch looked back to Mudi speaking in a more excited tone. "Due to your current state of bi-location(s) Hex cannot just fly the ship here and land the in the parking lot. Hex has assured us that under the current rules of parallel orbital mechanics and Chaos Physics, it is far too dangerous... He might get blown out of the sky, captured or manifest into the core of the Earth. He states that there are too many variables even for a quantum A.I. to calculate just yet. He says the technology does not exist here yet that will allow for your safe retrieval and the subsequent time-patch. According to Hex, once he has you on board he can splice the necessary math to untie the knot. But there is only one problem he said..."

Fred stopped chewing on the pencil as his brow cinched in and his eyes narrowed. "What?"

Gooch lightly patted Fred on the head. "You have to invent the technology."