Buried Treasure by Vincent Madison

Chapter 6

The Truth is Out There.

Kate and Tom were visiting the LOST Gunmen in the hope of finding out what was going on, and why their boss - Lieutenant Becker had taken the rusty box from the evidence room.

Robert Francis Bond, the leader of the LOST Gunmen had just told Kate that the Gunmen were not pretending to be TV characters, but that it was the 'other way around'.

  "Oh I see." Kate said. "So they made a TV show about you guys?"

 It was clear that although Kate found this conversation somewhat amusing, Bond was quite serious.

  "Obviously you have heard of the X-Files and The LONE Gunmen?" he said rhetorically. Kate nodded slightly. "Well Detective... uh.."

  "Gibson. Detective Gibson." Kate advised.

  "Gibson. Yes. Well Detective Gibson, let me tell you a little bit about TV that you might not know." Uncharacteristically quiet, Tom was leaning in and eager to hear what the Gunmen had to say.

   Robert continued. "While a lot of TV and movies are fictional and just for entertainment, there are a few shows and movies that are much more. The entertainment industry is a pretty political industry. To get anything done, you need to know people, and tell the right message. A few people have found ways to tell their own message. They have found ways to pitch a TV show to the network and the investors that seems to match the message they are looking for, but either subliminally, or in some cases more obviously (although that can be dangerous), they send a different message."

Tom now spoke.

  "What kind of message?" He asked.

  "The message of truth." Bond spoke. "Do you think it was a coincidence that Chris Carter chose the tagline 'The Truth is Out There'? Chris knew a lot of people, he knew what the truth really was, and he wanted to get the message out. He managed to do it more successfully than most. Do you remember the first X-Files season? It actually stated that the stories being told were 'based on true events'. That disappeared silently later on, but the truth is that most of what was in the X-Files WAS true. Chris knew of us when we were publishing our newspaper. The Lone Gunmen WERE us. Later, he even created the TV show - The Lone Gunmen. The pilot episode was about domestic terrorists taking remote control of a passenger jet and crashing it into the World Trade Center in order to invoke retaliation against anti-American extremists. It was aired in March 2001, six months prior to 9-11. Coincidence? The reason the Lone Gunmen TV show was so campy and comedic was to allow the hidden message to be aired without being too serious which would lead to it being shut down, which of course it ultimately was."

  "Wow." Tom shook his head.

  "Interesting." said Kate.

  "That is just the tip of the iceberg, and the most obvious." Bond continued. "There are many more shows whose message is 'The Truth is Out There'. LOST, Fringe, Alias, Heroes. They all tell the truth about what 'they' don't want you to believe. Why do you think LOST was pitched as absolutely not science fiction?, not time travel? Abrams knew what he wanted to say, but he knew what he had to pitch to get it on the air. These people take risks to get the message out - a message neatly wrapped as fiction and entertainment."

Kate and Tom were both listening intently.

  "Did you ever see the M. Night Shymalan film 'Unbreakable'?" Bond asked. Tom nodded. Kate shook her head.

  "It is the story of a security guard, played by Bruce Willis, who slowly realizes that he is a real-life superhero. The film explores the analogies between the real world and the mythology of superheroes. Most legends and myths are actually real. Werewolves, superheroes, aliens, lost worlds, strange places.

   Why do you think we are all so fascinated by them? By the idea of time travel, or Shangri-La? It's because they were and are real. We know it in our inherited memories.

   You know how we inherit physical traits from our ancestors? Simple traits - like a crooked mouth that can go back centuries or more. The Campbell's of Scotland had that trait. The name 'Campbell' in Gaelic translates as 'Cam Beul', meaning 'curved mouth'. Today, there are Campbell ancestors with that same crooked mouth.

   So if we inherit physical traits, why could we not inherit memories? Memories are our ability to store information mentally. But, do you know how we store them?  Long-term memories, are maintained by stable and permanent changes in neural connections widely spread throughout the brain. Actual physical changes to the neural pathways that are permanent. So when you conceive children, some of these physical 'characteristics' can be passed on as easily as blue eyes, brown hair or a crooked mouth. That is what past lives are. They don't mean you once WERE someone else, they mean you have the MEMORIES of someone else, and that someone is your ancestor. There is no limit to how long the memories can be passed on, so you can have memories from a hundred years ago, a thousand or a million. You know vampires are real, because deep in that part of your brain where those passed down memories reside, your ancestor actually faced them. You know about lost worlds that had advanced civilizations long before history says we did, because your ancestors were there. How do you think the ancient maps from the 1500's depict the coastline of Antarctica accurately when it has never in our known history been free of ice?"

  "That's a lot to take in." Kate exhaled.

  "There are people who understand this." Bond went on. "They realize that these myths and legends are real. They also know that there are other people who realize this, but that they do not want you to know, because they want to use the information for their own evil purposes. They want to use the knowledge to find people with these skills or traits, to find the unique places that have great power, to use the knowledge to gain ultimate power. The good people on our side want to expose the evil ones, and to let you know that these things are real. There are a good number of them that use the entertainment industry - TV and movies to do just that. Think of it as the Justice League. The evil ones also have their own organization, which has been known by many names over the millennia. You may know them recently as the Widmore 6, although there are many more than just six of them."

  "Widmore?" Tom questioned. "You mean like LOST Widmore?"

  "Yes that's the one." Robert confirmed. "The Charles Widmore in LOST is based on a real person - the same person as Conrad Strughold - the leader of the Syndicate in the X-Files. The Syndicate, or Company, or Widmore 6, or whatever you want to call them have been a group for centuries. The earliest documented evidence of their existence as a group was in 1165 in Brasov, Romania, where they were allegedly vampires."

Kate spoke up.  "Vampires? Are you for real?"

  "I told you that ancient legends are often true." Robert emphasized. "I know it's hard to believe, but there is some science to back most of this up, some of it quite recent. Science is showing how anti-gravity is possible, invisibility, and even teleportation."

  "Cool!" Tom whistled softly.

Kate asked:  "So, assuming you guys are correct. Then what is up with this wormhole, time-travel and old rusted box? And why is Becker involved?"

Silent until now, Malcolm Frommer said: "Yeah, what IS up with that?"  Steve continued playing with his oscilloscope.

  Robert walked over to a blackboard and picked up a piece of chalk. "It's easier to draw you a picture." he said, drawing what looked like a sheet of paper folded over in a U-shape. Between the two flat surfaces he drew a kind of hourglass shaped tunnel running from the top sheet to the bottom. "A wormhole is just a shortcut between two places in Space-Time. Instead of travelling the conventional route along the sheet, around the U-shape and onto the folded over portion, we can just pop through the shortcut!" He drew lines showing the long route and the short one through the tunnel or wormhole.

  "But how does the wormhole get there?" Tom asked.

  "A good question." Robert answered. "In some cases, wormholes just exist naturally, either stable over a period of time, or fluctuating in and out of existence. Some are in predictable places based on the electromagnetic field and gravitational forces. Others can be created by man under the right conditions. The one we detected was a bit of both. The place where the box was found - Joker's Hill is a well known area for magnetic and gravitational anomalies. Why do you think the University of Toronto has that whole area as a Scientific Reserve? It's not just to study flowers!

  In this case, however, someone created a huge magnetic surge that opened the wormhole. Once the surge died down, the wormhole closed again, but in that time, the box was transported through space-time."

  "From where?" Tom asked.

  "From where and when you mean?" Robert clarified. "From what we know about that box, we believe it was an experiment in time and space teleportation. The box itself was from around the 1950's originally, and so were some of the contents, like the binoculars. The film was from the 1970's, and the toy airplane from the 1970's or 1980's. The newspaper was a key. It was originally from 2008 - from the future, and then sent back to the 1950's so when we found it, it was around 60 years old."

  "So the newspaper IS real AND from the future AND the past? Whoa, my head hurts." Tom rubbed his head as he spoke.

  "With the evidence gone, we are not going to be able to prove that." Kate pointed out.  At that point, Steve who had appeared not to be listening looked up.

  "I may not look that smart, but I have learned to trust no one." He reached over to a desk drawer and pulled out an old newspaper page.

  "Is that...?" Tom started

  "Yah dude. I pulled a page off the newspaper and pocketed it before you guys took everything. Like I said - trust no one."

  "Awesome!" Tom smiled.

  "So what about Becker? How does he fit in? And why this experiment anyway?" Kate shot the unanswered questions at the Gunmen. She could be a pit bull when she wanted to.

  Robert responded. "I'm honestly not sure where Becker fits in. He's not one of the Widmore 6, and he is not known to us. My guess is that someone is using him...someone who has something on him or is blackmailing him. The experiment is part of a larger plan to stabilize the ability to move things through time and space - forwards, backwards and where they want things to go. Whether it is the Widmore 6 conducting the initial experiment, we are still not sure, although we suspect them."

  "So what now?" Tom asked.

Frommer puffed out his chest, smiled at Kate and said: "We did get a lead on that car that was tailing you."

  "Well?" Kate impatiently gestured.

  "It was a B.C. plate, which did not show up in the DMV database, meaning it was fake. We, however have the talents and abilities to go well beyond traditional means to find things out." Frommer was on a roll.

  "Do tell." Kate's sarcasm was returning.

  "Steve tapped into the traffic camera system and took the video and ran it through our plate recognition software to try to find a match to the plate. It took a while, but we found it."

  "Where?" Tom asked.

  "Well, first we ran the Greater Toronto area traffic camera database. We picked it up around the city over the past week or so only, but not anywhere significant, so we looked back where you might expect to find a B.C. licence plate - B.C.

   We ran the matching program and picked up one place where the plate kept showing up on a regular basis."

  "And where might that be?" Kate was eager to get an answer.

  "Kamloops." Malcolm said. "And we lucked out. The highway it showed up on really only goes to one place. The Widmore Institute."