Hallie Little
Hallie Little saw the extraordinary for only six minutes before it was gone from her life forever. Her journey started a week before those six minutes in a parked car downtown. She rubbed her hands together trying to keep them warm. The heater in the car had been on the fritz for months and she hadn’t had the time (or honestly the money) to get it fixed. She drank the last dregs of the coffee sitting in her cracked cup holder making a face at the unpleasant sensation of the cold coffee going down her throat. She glanced at the Starbucks across the street wanting another cup to warm her up, but also worried about becoming recognizable to the people who worked there.
It was good she didn’t go in as at that moment a black town car pulled up to the front of the gleaming tower across the street. Hallie hopped out of her car, already calling, “Mr. Moore, Mr. Moore what do you have to say about the Pontus Project?” The man who had walked out of the car had been walking briskly toward the door however when he heard the specifics of the question he paused and turned with an indulgent smile.
“Ms. Little, back for...what are we at now round six? Seven?”
“Nine,” she answered.
Mr. Moore tilted his head in exaggerated thought, “Oh yes I suppose if you count that blog post about my company being one of the backers of the now privatized area 51, and that tabloid article that got published--congratulation by the way--about me and three other billionaires most likely to be--what was it?--human agents of an alien spy ring, then I suppose this would be round nine. Since those accusations also included other companies or people I hadn’t thought of them.”
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Hallie tried to ignore the complicated mixture of irritation, pride and shame at the knowledge that he had read her article.
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“I need to know about the Pontus Project,” she said.
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“No you don’t,” Merrick Moore said with a shake of his head. "You want to, but you don’t need to.”
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“What is the Pontus Project? There are rumors of you diverting a significant number of your research and financial resources to an ocean based project. What is your interest in the Atlantic?”
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“I like to take long walks on the beach Ms. Little,” Moore studied her for a moment. “And what is your interest here?”
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“I’m a reporter.”
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Moore didn’t scoff at that, or laugh the way a lot of people did when Hallie Little made that claim. Especially the people she was hounding. Instead he smiled a little, a look that Hallie thought reflected her own earlier mix of irritation, shame and pride.
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“You’re definitely a modern writer Ms. Little. Blogging is the medium of the present for young people and so I suppose yes you are a reporter even if its not for the Times.”
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“Don’t.” Hallie snapped not wanting his help or his kindness or his pity. At least not like this. Only on her own terms.
Moore studied her for a moment, “Have you ever heard of Pontus Cabrera?”
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Hallie had heard about a lot of people, the stranger the better. It took her a moment to dredge up the story, finally remembering a reddit chain she had read a few years ago “He was a...pirate or something right? A Captain of a ship in the 16th century. His entire ship went missing and was never found. No survivors. They were taken by the same aliens who took the colony of Roanoke,” she added at the end with a hint of excitement.
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Moore rolled his eyes. “Well as usual maybe half of that was actual facts. He wasn’t a pirate but he was an explorer who sailed a ship, the Isabella, named for the Spanish queen who sponsored him. And he wasn’t taken by aliens.”
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“Oh so you know what happened to him and his crew?” She couldn’t resist the snap, his tone too grating.
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“Actually yes. That’s the Pontus Project. We’ve found his ship.”
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“Why would you care about some 16th century explorer's ship? That’s not even..its not like he would have anything to interest you like treasure.” For the first time Hallie’s tone wasn’t even accusatory she was genuinely puzzled and sucked into the mystery.
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“I have a passion for history,” Moore said, turning to go into his building.
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“No you don’t,” Hallie answered absently, pushing her glasses to the bridge of her nose and lost in thought. Then louder, stopping Moore from reaching for the door, “No, you really don’t. Your whole thing is about the future. New tech, new heights, new research. You don’t care about history.”
“I like being the first to get to do things. Why not be the first to find Old Pontus after all these years?”
“That’s your story? An old explorer and your mid-life crisis. You don’t want to deny that this has something to do with making stealth subs for the Russians?”
“You mean against the Russians.”
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“No,” Hallie said challengingly.
Now Moore really did look irritated. “I’m a patriot Ms. Little, not some communist, and you can write that in your blog.”
“Oh, you’ll see what I write in my blog,” she promised.
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Mr. Moore had opened the door to his building and without turning around he spoke, “Oh, and Hallie? Take your car to the mechanic on 21st street tomorrow. He’ll fix it for you and send the bill to me.”
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“I don’t want your help!” She snarled.
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“No,” Merrick Moore, her biological father said, “but you need it.” Then he was striding into the building. Hallie stormed over to her car across the street barely missing running over a teenager signing at her friend. She jumped in her car and ignored the loud groaning sound the vents made as the heater tried to chug on.
How dare he? She thought. As if her coming here had had anything to do with...to do with their unfortunate connection. She was just following the story. She only ever followed the story. Was it her fault her bastard father was into some shady shit? Well, technically she was the bastard in this situation, and he was just the billionaire who had paid her mother a large sum of money twenty years ago to stay quiet about it. Not that Hallie had ever seen any of the money, as it had been lost to online casinos by the time she was ten.
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Just as she was about to take her car out of park the x-files tune started to play from her phone. She checked it to see two new text messages
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JB: G
JB: Nva aol pumv fvb ylxblzalk. dpyl whftlua av hjjvbua.
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It was a shift code. It took Hallie a minute and she had to scribble some of it out on a receipt in her cup holder but the first letter told her A=G so she shifted the letters of the alphabet seven down and decoded the message: Got the info you requested. wire payment to account.
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She sent a reply
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HL: You know I’m good for it. What did you find?
It was a risk, and not something Hallie would try with her usual contacts, but her and Jalahdi had become friends recently. This had surprised Hallie as Jalahdi was a professional thief and she herself was just a struggling freelance journalist (conspiracy theorist, Jalahdi had said over drinks with a laugh). (Maybe, Hallie had admitted, but a conspiracy theorist with good enough tech skills and connections to get you out of that mess on the coast.)
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Worrying her lip between her teeth and watching her phone intently Hallie still jumped when the message came through
JB: Alright. Alright, but you're buying me a drink next time I’m in town.
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HL: Sure!
Hallie face palmed. Was the exclamation point too much? Jalahdi was a real life thief. God she just wanted to sound cool.
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JB: Acquired some data from Moore’s private server. Found coordinates: 25N75W.
Hallie read the message with a blink.
HL: Are you messing with me?
She regretted sending it as soon as she did. There had to be a more polite way to ask that.
JB: No?
Hallie hurried to explain herself
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HL: Its just that those are coordinates to the Bermuda Triangle.
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JB: Wow maybe you really are onto something
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Hallie felt her heart speed up a little. Maybe she was. Shady billionaire funds shady sea research at the Bermuda Triangle...the corkboard in her head was being frantically rearranged as her thoughts zipped around trying to connect the evidence with red string. She had no problem coming up with theories. What she needed was one theory. The right one. More than that, what she needed was proof.
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She was broken from her thoughts by another text message
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JB: Oh there were some other numbers too. Not coordinates. I almost thought they were just corrupted bits of data but maybe you can use them: 2008110315/2207230440/2612260150.
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Hallie put her car in drive and thought about these numbers as she drove to her apartment. She tried to find a pattern. It was the same amount of numbers in each sequence. It always started with a two. The first number almost looked like a year “2008” but the other numbers would be dates that hadn’t happened yet...and there were too many numbers to be a date, she decided. The first number would have been 2008/11/03 with an extra 15. She slowed to a stop at a red light shivering. This light always took forever to change, she thought irritably glancing at the clock on her dashboard.
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The clock! The numbers could still be dates...if the last numbers were times! She tried it with the first sequence: 20/08/11/03/15. Or she thought: August 20th 2011 at 3:15. She went through her glossary of strange things in her head trying to find anything that matched that date. She had files at home she could cross reference easy enough.
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The light turned green and she started forward still absorbed in her thoughts of the numbers. She let them dance before her eyes. The second sequence would be July 22 2023 at 4:40 and the third would have been December 26 2026 at 1:50. She had always liked codes. When she was younger she had exhausted her mother into trying to make a secret language for the two of them. She lingered on that third code...it's the same if the date or the year are reversed so I probably got that one right, she thought absently. Then she almost got in an accident slamming the brakes on her car. She ignored the honking behind her as a new thought entered her head: what if she switched the date and year? The second code would be July 23 2022 at 4:40, and the first would have been...August 11th 2020 at 3:15. That was a week away!
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She felt like her blood had been changed to champaign. Something airy, and bubbly with a bit of sting going through her body. She felt light headed and giddy and almost like she shouldn’t be driving in this state of mind.
She shouldn’t be driving. I need a boat, she thought recklessly, or reasonably it's impossible to tell drunk.
It took some serious pull with her connections not all of whom were as amused and in debt to her as Jalahdi was, but she was finally able to trade a free, full ranged, fully paid for tune up of Gary Santos’ (one of her contacts in the community) truck in exchange for twenty-four hours with his boat. She would need it a bit longer to sail down to the Triangle and decided she could beg for forgiveness when she got back. She texted him the address to the 21st street mechanics and raced down to the marina with a bag stuffed with supplies. The boat was called The Enemy Above which Hallie absently thought was a reference to something, but couldn’t think what. As her mind was often attuned to the extra-terrestrial her thoughts went there and she thought the title was maybe in reference to alien invaders from the stars. The thought made her feel more at home on the boat.
It was a medium sized motor boat, and her friend, being of the same cloth as she was, had stored a month's worth of fuel inside the boat. She wouldn’t need that much. She did know how to drive a boat after spending her summers working as a councillor at a swanky outdoor summer camp when she was a teenager. The camp had been for rich kids and it only occurred to her now as she turned the key in the boat that the reason she had gotten the job among the rich and famous’ children was because her biological father had pulled some strings. It was exactly the kind of nepotism she tried to expose in her writing, and she had benefited from it.
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She pulled away from the mariana and when she was far enough away from the dock she turned the lights on the boat off. While she knew how to drive a boat she didn’t, technically speaking, have a boating license.
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Hallie reached the coordinates at 9PM on August 10th, She wasn’t sure which 3:15 the sequence Jalahdi had sent her was referring to. If it was the morning or the afternoon. Some part of her, the part that believed in all the red threads that connected all the strange things in the world, that part thought it would be three in the morning. The witching hour. Not that she believed in magic really. For all her connections (conspiracies) her theories always were rooted in science. But if something was going to happen, she felt certain it should happen at three in the morning.
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The ocean was a massive place. It is hard to truly understand just how much water there is on Earth. Although the Triangle was a relatively busy part of the sea there was no one around. No lights or sounds that Hallie could see. She was too far from any coast to see land. It was deeper darkness than any she had even been in before. Hallie realized suddenly, as she checked her phone and noted that the famous Bermuda Triangle effect had cut out the signal, that she had never been alone in all her life. She had lived always inches from other people; there was always a neighbour down the hall, a person driving down the street, a friend at her fingertips with her phone. However, now she was for the first time really alone in the world. The sea matched the sky in a swirling black that surrounded her on all sides with no end in sight.
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Hallie was frozen by the throttle of the boat. The darkness and loneliness and vastness of the world seemed to press down on her until she was being smothered by it. She fell to her knees taking huge gulping breaths. She could go. She could just go back to her city, with her writing, and her corkboard, and her biological father she didn’t care about.
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Heroic and brave moments are so often framed as spectacle. Fierce battle against many opponents at once, bouts with terrifying monsters, greatness done in front of a crowd on a stage, or exceptional moments of cleverness to be sung about forever. But the only moments when bravery really matters are those moments that no one else sees. When a person is alone, as truly alone as Hallie Little was that midnight in the middle of the sea, that is when they are most heroic.
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Crushed by despair, Hallie thought that she could go, and as she gripped the throttle to push the boat forward she had another thought, or she could stay. She could stay and finally see for herself something strange. Something amazing. She could prove she was right, to herself, if not to everyone else. Heroism is not always meant to be witnessed, but some things are so rare and so fleeting they demand to be viewed and remembered by someone, they cry for the immortality of memory and story. Hallie knew that what was going to happen was one of those moments, something that would not happen again for another two years if the sequence was right, something rare and strange, and deserving of an audience.
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So she stayed and waited the three hours taking Gravol to help her sea sickness as the boat was rocked and every so often checking her position to be sure she wasn’t pushed off course.
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Once three AM hit she began counting down the minutes until it was 3:13, 3:14, and then 3:15. She waited straining her eyes against the black. She had turned the lights of the boat on to help her with this but there was so much darkness and the blades of light could only cut through so much.
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The champagne bubbles in her blood began to pop. Nothing happened and she felt despair, the hangover of hope, creep up on her.
“Come on!” She yelled. To the sea, the sky, to the enemy above, and the enemy below. Her preoccupation with ET meant that her eyes had been on the sky, and she missed when it started to happen in the sea. She missed the first few splashes and it wasn’t until they started getting faster, faster than the slap of the waves against her boat, that she realized something was happening. She turned her attention to water. About twenty feet from where she was she saw the sea began to bubble and boil.
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She stumbled back from the sight before steeling her nerves. She had agreed to stay, and watch, and she had promised herself. The bubbling got stronger and the water more disturbed until something broke the surface. It was a ship about half the size of her boat and shaped like a pyramid. The ship seemed to hover above the sea for a moment. Hallie grabbed her camera and night vision lens snapping shots in a rapid fire succession. She wondered why the ship was just hovering there and then had a horrible thought--that it was doing the same thing to her that she was doing to it. That it was watching her.
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She lowered the camera slowly locked in a kind of staring contest wondering what the ship would do, and wondering what she wanted it to do. After a pause which lasted forever and few heart beats the ship began to rise. Hallie watched it for as long as she could until it vanished into the black.
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The sea began making suspicious noises and again Hallie’s attention was brought from the sky. The ocean where the craft had risen was sloshing and churning and spinning rapidly.
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Hallie remembered something she had used to see on cartoons as a kid: whirlpools. The ocean seemed to be draining like that ship had been some kind of plug in the ocean floor.
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Hallie’s boat was too close and she was sent flying as it was sucked into the whirlpool spinning around and around the edges as it grew larger. She was slammed into the side of the boat and managed to save herself from going over, but the camera in her hands went flying over the edge and into the sea.
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“No!” She yelled thinking of her proof, of having it in her hands and having it snatched away in minutes. She was spinning deeper and deeper into the whirlpool, being sucked toward the swollen opening. She dragged herself toward the bow of the boat and crawled up the captain’s chair. She gunned the throttle trying to get the boat out of the swirling whirlpool but the pull was too strong. As she spun closer and closer to the center she could see something at the bottom of the opening when the lights of her boat swung in the right direction. She saw in dizzying flashes a city made out of metal at the bottom of the ocean. The buildings were in pointed and twisted shapes sticking out at jagged angles. In the whirlpool she saw something more horrifying: faces. They pressed just just below the surface with pale skin and huge black eyes.
The spinning wouldn’t stop. The faces wouldn’t go away. Around and around Hallie went until she was circling the drain right over the lip of the whirlpool and the twisted city below. Deciding that she needed to act now or she would become one of the legends of the Triangle forever, Hallie ripped the seat cover off the captain's chair and pulled out the hidden canister of fuel. She lurched to the edge of the boat and poured it over into the water as she spun. She felt for the plastic whistle attached to her life vest and unscrewed it. Inside were six matches. The boat began to tip stern first into the whirlpool. Hallie climbed her way to the bow and held on with one hand. The boat began to tilt and she struck the first match. It didn’t light and she tried reaching for another. The boat tipped further and in her scramble for purchase the other four matches went flying from the plastic whistle and into the water. She clutched the match remaining in her hand. The boat tottering on the edge. She struck. The match lit and she tossed it into the sea praying it wouldn’t go out before it hit the waves.
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She was lucky. Or clever. Or brave. Some mixture of the three like all heroes. The fuel she had poured over the side ignited. The faces in the whirlpool began to scream as the sea caught fire. Hallie felt herself spinning again, spinning harder and harder. She tasted a sick mixture of bile, smoke and salt in her mouth, and heard her own screams and those of aliens in her ears until eventually the smell of smoke faded, and the screaming did too.
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Hallie lay on her back on the The Enemy Above looking up at the sky. After catching her breath she looked away to the water where she knew the real danger was.
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No one is going to believe me without the camera, she thought. Then acknowledging the time she lived in, no one was going to believe me anyway. She climbed to her feet. She turned the key and the boat started up. Her backpack had remained aboard and there were the paranoid stores left on the ship. She should have enough food to make it home. She looked at her navigation seeing she had spun just outside of the Bermuda Triangle. She pointed her bow toward home looking at the digital clock on the console with some surprise. 3:21 Had it only been six minutes since that ship had risen from the waves?
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Hallie thought about the sequence Jalahdi had sent her. The next sequence decoded to July 23 2022. That was two years to come up with a plan. To gather allies. She wondered if Jalahdi could be convinced to come and decided to bring it up over drinks. There was the matter of her biological father too, whose Pontus project had something to do with all this. The corkboard in her mind was rearranged as the red string of her thoughts untangled and repinned itself in a new pattern. So much planning to do, but she had time, and in two years...she would be ready with more than one camera.
