Session 4: Music of the Spheres

(correction: it was previously stated that Scot lived near Mission Beach High with college student roommates. Scot actually lives on a boat harbored in Mission Bay itself.)

Unable to turn away the telescopes or turn them off altogether, the investigators decide to head to the Quonset hut to find supplies to burn the tower down. Dr Guest, who is slipping in and out of consciousness, they decide to leave as "he looks tired". They take
his security badge, and head to the hut with the fire axe recently wielded by Dr Neal.

They find the hut locked (with a key lock) and so they use the axe to hack a hole in the corrugated metal beside the door, and reach in to unlock it from inside. In the hut they find two trucks: a canvas-covered jeep, and a larger truck with a winch attached. After
failed hotwiring attempts they settle on taking a mostly-empty can of gasoline and return to the tower.

The tower seems deserted now. On the first floor is the library, and they grab armloads of astronomy periodicals and carry them upstairs to the control room. Rupert, no doctor, concludes anyway that Dr Guest is now dead. They scatter the magazines around the room, douse them in gasoline, and set them on fire. It is now sometime past 2:00am,
and they decide to meet their mysterious visitor by the demolished radio telescope. They take Zach's car down the rails, but only after convincing him that he will be recompensed for his deductible in the event the car is damaged.

It is pitch black and pouring rain, and as they approach the dish they can see by the car's headlights a figure standing near the base, in a large overcoat and a broad-brimmed hat. The figure does not look at them. They pull up and step out of the vehicle, but do not approach.

"Who are you?" asks Rupert.

The figure responds in a buzzing voice, as though speaking through a kazoo. "We seek to stop the music of the spheres," he says.

"Who's we?" asks the investigators. They look around, but see no one else. The figure reaches into his overcoat and produces a round object, about the size of a cantaloupe. He stoops and rolls it toward the investigators.

At this point, a terrible thing happens. Zach Brewer, still suffering from paranoia, panics at the sight of the mysterious object and draws his weapon. He has historically had trouble hitting his target, but suddenly he's a sharpshooter. As the object rolls toward them he fires and hits it, and it explodes in a massive blast of purple flame. Scot dives behind the door of the car, which provides some cover, but Zach and Rupert suffer the full extent of the explosion.

The Civic is mostly ruined, with extensive body damage and all the windows shattered. Scot peers over the door and the figure slowly stands upright. "Tend to your fallen," he says. Scot feebly tries to piece his friends back together, but ultimately decides that it is
impossible. Suddenly two bizarre, fungous, bat-winged creatures with insect legs drop clumsily from the sky and collect the bodies of Rupert and Zach, and silently fly away. The figure in the overcoat, which Scot can now identify as one of these creatures in disguise, produces another round object and instructs Scot to take it back to the control room of the main tower. As Scot looks at it, he somehow intuits that rubbing a slightly discolored part of the ball's surface will activate the thing.

Scot drives back to the tower, which is now in flames, and runs inside. He mounts several flights of stairs but the heat is too intense to go on. From the base of the staircase to the top floor he rubs the sphere, which begins to vibrate, and throws it up the stairs.
It ricochets once off a wall and bounces into the control room. He flees. The tower rocks with an explosion and as he emerges to the outside he sees the main dish in several pieces lying beside the tower. The thrumming, discordant space-music from the loudspeakers has stopped.

He tries to hotwire the Charger, but is unsuccessful. He drives North, away from the Observatory and away from Mecca, skirts Palm Springs, and takes smaller highways back to San Diego. This takes some time, as he has no windshield. After several hours the radio reports indicate that the mayhem has subsided in Mecca.

Scot returns to his boat, leaving the car in the harbor parking lot, and heads to Ensenada for a week. He receives a call from the parents of Stan Arnold, who tell him that Stan committed suicide in his cell the night of the disaster in Mecca. The photograph that Rupert took of the radio telescope exploding, that included a glimpse of one of
the strange buzzing creatures and which he forwarded that night by email to his editor, is for some reason never printed in the paper.

One morning, Scot wakes up in Ensenada to find two iridescent metallic cylinders on the deck of his boat. Examining them, he sees strange devices connected to the outside, including speakers of some sort. Suspicious, he begins to roll one to the edge of the deck, until it says "Scot! It's me, Rupert!" The other introduces itself as Zach Brewer. Scot looks around for a device that could be transmitting these voices, and even sails way out to sea to escape the transmit range. The cylinders relate that the last thing they remembered was an explosion, and then became conscious again in these devices that
allow them to speak, see and hear. Their human bodies are gone, but their brains live on in these brain-cylinders.

Upon returning to San Diego, Scot finds that he is now a Person of Interest in the missing-persons cases of Rupert Putkin and Zach Brewer, given that Zach's car is parked near his dock and that he was in the papers following the outburst at the NSCA press conference (where Rupert's Charger was later discovered), and told not to leave
the county.

With the help of voice-recognition software and Scot's computer, Rupert began a conspiracy theory blog. It can be read at http://braincylinder.blogspot.com/.