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Lily turned to him, saying, “You don’t know just how special and unique you are.”

Her comment took him off guard. She wasn’t trying to flatter him or appeal to his vanity. He could tell that from the sincerity in her voice. She was speaking as though this was something he didn’t understand about himself.

Rain lashed the outside of the truck, pelting the trailer with what sounded like hail. It probably wasn’t hail, but the thin sheet metal magnified the sound of the torrential downpour that had begun to fall.

Jason felt as though the night were a dream. He looked into Lily’s eyes and saw her compassion for him. To her, this whole scenario apparently seemed quite ordinary, and as bizarre as that was, he was drawn to accepting her position. Her demeanor was relaxed, as though her blistering bike ride was nothing, as though sweet, little, lost Lily had returned to sit beside him. In his mind’s eye, he saw her again asking something quirky about the torn, tatty posters in his rundown apartment. She may have been acting for the past few days, he thought, but even knowing that, he felt he understood those points at which the real Lily had shone through.

Between the demeanor of Lily and the familiarity of Lachlan, Jason felt accepted, as though this twisted reality that had caught up with him was the norm. While he was tempted to freak out, they set him at ease with their matter of fact handling of the bizarre tempest breaking around him.

Lily was Lachlan’s daughter! As strange as that was, that was perhaps the easiest thing to believe so far. In the back of his mind the notion that someone had been shooting at him was disturbing.

Lachlan must have sensed his distraction. He flipped through a thick folder as he spoke.

“The NSI has been working with DARPA for decades, trying to figure out what these equations mean,” Lachlan continued. Jason wondered if he should think of him as Captain John Lee? But that name meant nothing to Jason. To him, this was Professor Lachlan. As surreal as his world had become, the professor was a link with reality, with sanity.

“Do you remember these?” the professor asked. He held an old piece of crumpled paper marked with crayon. The formulas weren’t as advanced and the handwriting was childish, but Jason remembered them. Somewhere in the back of his mind, that sheet of old, brittle paper looked strangely familiar. “You’ve been drawing these equations ever since you were a child. Haven’t you ever wondered why?”

Why?

No, he hadn’t ever stopped to think about why he scribbled.

For Jason, abstract thinking was as unconscious as humming a tune or chewing on gum. He’d never wondered why he doodled, he just did, in the same way some people chewed their nails when lost in thought. It was more than being absentminded, he knew that. Time would drift. Hours would pass, but he was content, at peace. Nothing else mattered, nothing other than those equations. Slowly, they’d take different forms. Each time, his perceptual awareness enlarged, and he found himself with a deeper appreciation of the universe.

Most of the equations were common, having been derived by others like Bohr or Schrödinger, but Jason had arrived at them himself, having reasoned through the math alone, and he found that intensely satisfying.

Why did he scribble physics equations? Was there a reason beyond his own simple whim and want? He could see Lachlan was giving him time to think this through for himself. He thought he knew, but clearly there was more for him to learn. He pursed his lips, leaning forward intently, listening carefully as Lachlan explained.

“Twenty years ago, a meteor streaked across the Russian Federation, entering the atmosphere over the region of Krasnoyarsk. US EarthSat picked it up over Lake Baikal. It should have struck somewhere in Mongolia, but the meteor conducted a course correction.”

Jason felt his mouth dry out at the implications of Lachlan’s matter of fact recounting of this distant, historical event. He had no reason to doubt the professor. This wasn’t Mitchell sitting next to him in a diner with some trashy online tabloid, bullshitting his way through some crackpot conspiracy theory. This was a senior college professor with a mastery of physics.

“The object crossed the northern plains of China, passing over the Gulf of Chihli before ditching in the Yellow Sea, off the coast of North Korea.”

“Ditching?” Jason asked.

Lachlan nodded, adding “The USS Winterhalter was on exercise out of Seoul. She picked up the craft doing Mach 2 and observed it decelerate before ditching roughly fifty nautical miles north of her position. The Winterhalter then launched a helicopter, assuming she was searching for survivors from a downed military jet.”

Lachlan handed Jason a couple of photos. Although they were in color, they were grainy, highlighting the distance at which they’d been taken. The first image showed what looked like a whale or a submarine sitting heavy in the water, with just a small, broad, flat expanse above the waves. The object was circular rather than elongated, though, and looked out of place beneath the sea. A North Korean fishing boat floated just off to one side of the submerged object, providing a sense of scale. The dark object was roughly a hundred feet in diameter, with faint lights glowing around its circumference.

The second image was one Jason had seen before. This was the picture Mitchell had shown him in the Weekly World News article, only this image was grainy, with features like the mast and sails on the fishing boat barely visible. Jason looked up at Lachlan who seemed to know what he was thinking.

“These are the originals,” Lachlan explained. “Taken from the raw footage before any digital enhancements were applied.”

As in the crisp, clear version he’d seen in the Weekly World News, a North Korean fisherman was leaning over the side of his boat pulling a young child from the water. The UFO was completely beneath the waves in this shot, drifting slowly below the fishing boat.

“So this is real?” Jason asked, already knowing the answer. “This actually happened?”

Lachlan must have recognized the rhetorical nature of Jason’s comment as he didn’t respond directly, he simply said, “Two days later, I flew in with a SEAL team to rescue you.”

“Me?” Jason replied, still struggling to accept everything that had happened since he’d returned to his apartment. His hand brushed against the bandages on his arms, marking where he’d rolled on the ground after jumping from a bus earlier that evening in what seemed like another lifetime.

Had he hit his head and been concussed?

Was this some kind of trauma induced hallucination?

Blood seeped through from around one of the plastic bandages sticking to his arm like a second skin. His left forearm was tender. The throb of pain after so much exertion holding on to the back of the bike convinced him this was real. This was no illusion. This was reality.

“I know it’s hard to believe,” Lachlan said, crouching before him. “But I was originally a search and rescue pilot, and look at me now, teaching physics in New York, and all because of you, all to try to unravel the mystery surrounding your life.”

Jason was shaking.

“It’s OK,” Lily said, squeezing his hand. “We’re here to help.”

“Me,” Jason repeated, only this time not as a question uttered in disbelief, but rather in sullen acceptance.

“I’m sorry,” Lachlan said, standing up. “Your life has been an elaborate ruse to try to unlock the secrets buried deep within your brain.”

“And my parents?” Jason asked.

“They never knew,” Lachlan replied. “They only ever saw a beautiful young boy abandoned in an orphanage, but you were never out of sight. DARPA, the South Korean Intelligence Service, the US Secret Service, they’ve never been more than a heartbeat away.”