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So Mr Mystery isn’t human And once he ht down, he doesn’t care what’s classified, and he pours out his heart to uratively, because the truth is he doesn’t have one To avoid like a thousand-page talking-head scene, what I’ll do is, I’ll condense it for you Myme to be concise and all

In the best of tiht be pretty difficult to be homeschooled by a mother who’s deeply committed to your education and who’s worried about the bankrupted country you’re likely to inherit But being homeschooled by my mother under the current conditions in Har as Marine Corps boot camp, it really is, except for ten-mile forced marches,She can’t protect e andand thinking, to prepare me for freedom if it ever happens One way she prepares oing to be the next J K Rowling Essays, profiles of historical figures, short stories in all kinds of genres--there’s never an end to it One thing she pushes hard for is concise writing She says, "Be concise, Jolie, be succinct, get to the point" Well, you can see what a long way I’ve got to go in that regard

Anyway, Mr Mystery isn’t human, and his name isn’t Mr Mystery The scientists at Wyvern called hihts The original Aladdin was able to su Now that I knohat this guy is, I sort of understand the half-baked logic of calling hiet it He dislikes the na to Ed, Fort Wyvern in its prime wasn’t just an army base Like maybe 5,000 of its 134,000 acres were set aside for all kinds of highly classified spooky projects that weren’t under the control of the army, that were run instead by who knoho and were funded froet," so they always had o as crazy as they wanted

This place I’ve been exploring has nothing to do with Project Aladdin This is where they worked on Project Polaris Just so you know, Polaris is the last star in the handle of the Little Dipper, if itmatters, even when it doesn’t seem to

Project Polaris was built to study alien artifacts, by which I don’t ht across the borders from Canada and Mexico Like ten years earlier, this satellite was conducting geological surveys and searching for possible oil deposits when it identified a ginormous unnatural mass not far off the coast of California Navy divers were sent down there, and they discovered a crashed but still watertight flying saucer, although according to Ed, the thing was less like a saucer than it was like a flying ith an upside-down custard cup where the lid handle should have been and with powdered-sugar dredgers where the bowl handles should have been, which frankly I can’t quite picture

As you overnment was hot to study this historic find, so they paid a two-billion-dollar bonus in advance to the security-cleared contractor--he was the husband of a senator--to finish this underground facility in one year By then, Fort Wyvern had been closed a long time and housed no military personnel, but its isolation made it an even more suitable location for deep-black projects Because of the reckless pace of construction, three times asthe building of Hoover Dam Some were crushed, some were blown up, some were run down by machinery, souy died during an argument with a union boss, when he fell into the excavation for a footing and was drowned in twenty tons of concrete According to Ed, all of the dead were buried at the government’s expense and were presented with a posthu or other Their spouses and children received lifeti free admission to all national parks, plus a 23 percent discount on refreshments and souvenirs purchased therein

Anyway, one of the weird artifacts taken frout difficulty is the silvery sphere that I can see now through the big s of this observation roo to do with the sphere He worked in another part of this facility, studying the bodies of the crew of the flying-wok thing He was super-interested in their DNA As anyone would expect--anyone but the govern, and the ETs’ genetic an to sneak into Dr Hiskott’s body, with him not even aware of it for a while You have to wonder if sohly educated people are really as smart as they’re supposed to be

So one day Hiskott is working in his lab with two assistants who must have been just as brilliant as he was, and suddenly three of his fingernails drop off, as if they were glued on and the glue went bad Everyone is startled, and as an assistant picks up one of the nails, another nail drops off, then two ernails And now in the tips of Dr Hiskott’s fingers, you can barely see where the nail beds once were I mean, there’s no depressions for the out almost before everyone’s eyes Finally those Harvard educations begin to pay off when these three scientists all make the connection bethat just happened to Hiskott and the fact that the dead ETs they’re studying don’t have fingernails

Ed, previously known as Aladdin, doesn’t describe things in the juicy detail you ht wish It’s just not in his nature to be super draine, as I sure can, the panic that gripped those three guys in that lab Their wing is herh a decontamination chamber, but now one of Hiskott’s assistants says they have to pull the alarency closed-circuit video conference with everyone else on Project Polaris The other assistant agrees, and so does Hiskott--but then he surprises the-bladed scalpel he’d used in the dissection of the aliens, slashing their carotid arteries, and they’re done for in like twelve seconds flat All this is captured by the in-lab cameras that record all procedures for posterity or whatever

Whether Dr Norris Hiskott was always your average mad scientist or whether he was driven wacko by the alien DNA that got into his brain, who can say? Maybe it’s a little of both So what he does then is, he cleans the blood off his hands, strips off his sh the decontaets to his house in Moonlight Bay, he right away strangles his wife to death, we don’t know if because she noticed he didn’t have fingernails or if e that would explain why he wore a hoodie when he checked in to the Hare, he wouldn’t help her wash the dishes or put out the trash, that kind of thing, and she nagged hile her for years, and now he had nothing to lose, so he did it

Meanwhile, for ation of thejust floated there, resisting all schemes to open it or discover its purpose Then in the three days before Norris Hiskott goesand especially on the afternoon he splits the scene,of Project Polaris where they keep the sphere People are spontaneously levitating around it The hands on atches spin so fast that orks begin to srows his hair back in like six er than when he ca vivid visions of disturbing landscapes that exist nowhere on Earth On the computer monitors, the faces of dead friends and relatives of the project staff appear, screa whom they address