Statistically speaking, airplanes were considered the safest way to travel.
The math tracked, there were less accidents in the air as opposed to the volatility of land… yet planes still fell. Engines gave out. Materials weren’t up to snuff. Companies cheapened out, cut corners, would lie over their earnings-reports, and snuff out those who attempt to suggest otherwise.
Building off of that… statistically speaking, recent reports had claimed that there was a 1 in 54,516 chance you could die from the sting of a bee, and that was still more likely than the chances of dying in a plane crash. Heart disease was the most conclusive, the most common, and yet plane crash and disappearance reports hit my desk a dozen more times than heart attacks ever could. No one ever thinks it’s going to be them.
The stranger the ordeal, the rarer it was supposed to be — abductions, oddities, and other “glitches” in the simulation. Exceptions to the rule of suggested normalcy. A bug bite turns out to be more than the average illness, the people following you are doing so purposefully, the way in which your television spoke to you wasn’t a coincidence, mothman offers to have sex with you… on and on it was like this, the oddities of the world and the unwillingness to make peace with it all.
My job was to investigate those exceptions. Things that weren’t quite right. To the layman, my work was to investigate bad luck. They never saw us coming, always made to forget we were even there — in and out as cleanly as possible, fixing their broken world and returning it to something better, blissfully ignorant.
Today’s case was supposed to be one such example.
Statistically speaking, it was told to me there was a 1/(5.2⁶¹) chance that when you slapped a table, your hand would pass right through it.
I’d heard it debated several times before, the supposed impossibility of it — but the chances were never zero. The probability that, one day, if attempted enough times, the atoms comprising one’s hand would phase through the materials structure and out the other side. Models were conducted, crafted. They’d ran the numbers. Nigh impossible, but never zero. The math had always made my head spin. One egghead after the next explained it differently, agreed to disagree, re-wrote the formula several times over.
Lately it was 5.2 to the 61st power, one of the eggheads had told me. If it took one second to raise your hand, one second to slap the table, and one second to recover, the action of slapping the table would be three seconds — meaning that in the space of several milliseconds between them the hand would theoretically phase through the structure quickly and with little recourse, a literal blink-and-you’d-miss-it phenomena. Techs contested the simulated incident, that the model’s math was incorrect; whereas other ruled pedantry, which seemed the bedrock of dissecting quantum mechanics, whether an atom would act independently of the others or in sync. The hand of a human often weighed 0.1 kilograms whereas an atom weighed roughly 10 octillion. But again… the fallacy of hypotheticals were founded upon working models that were always in flux, there were never agreements, never a decisive conclusion of when and how it would occur, and there were never plans in place to address what to do if it did.
That’s where I came in.
When I received the call, the techs almost couldn’t believe it. We’d covered stranger cases, statistically. Always intercepted the worst and most interesting of cases, took over from the medics and police when shit went south… but none felt as simple and disconcerting as this. The chance of it all, none of that bothered me. I’d seen mothman, I’d seen his groupies. What bothered me was how nonchalant this man appeared.
“Mr. Henderson?” I asked flatly, stepping into the shoddiness of his flat. It was difficult for me not to glance around, the man lived hard — walls plastered with faded posters of little green men, mentions of the Bermuda Triangle, the all-seeing eye... The faint, musty smell was undeniable. I’d have Richards and Dawson scan for an infestation of mold after all this. But, here and now, I flashed the man my badge, his single eye glossing over the credentials. It was clear upon his face, as day, the eyepatch framing the less-than-obvious worry of his features well. It suited him. I flipped the badge back, pocketed it, and then motioned at him as I begun to slip on a pair of gloves. The routine flowed as simply as before — to the point, cold and curt. “My name is Agent Torres. I’m here to help you… if that wasn’t already clear.”
He blinked, tried to relax his shoulders. He remained seated, disconcerted like anyone would be, but as before he seemed surprisingly tame in comparison to some of the other victims I’d helped. Nonplussed, like he was beaming with pride at the prospect of his misfortune, before reality set in. “Ten minutes… I’m impressed.” Confidence seeped from his lips, until suddenly it stopped, like a faucet switching off. He sputtered from there, realizing his situation. “To be… to be clear, I-I didn’t… I wasn’t sure if — I didn’t do anything wrong, okay?”
“Are you experiencing any pain?”
He shook his head. The look of disbelief hadn’t regressed, the beads of sweat falling down the sides of his temple in droves. “I don’t know which agency you’re from, but I was hoping, I…” He paused, glanced away from me. He wasn’t looking at the scarce amount of junk in his kitchen, it was like he was somewhere else, wanting something else. “J-just… please, tell me you can get it out — “
That’s what they’d always asked, in some form or another. I ducked, taking a knee to glance under the table. Several of his fingers were sticking out from the table’s underside, as his wrist was buried into the countertop. Raising upwards again, I looked between him and the current state of his hand. There were no specks of blood, no viscera caked around the impact site, nor were there any signs of damage to the oak-wood of the table itself. It appeared unscathed, unbothered by the intrusion, as though his hand hadn’t clipped through it and instead was merely apart of the window-dressing, the careful mesh of organic and inorganic material. They’d said the collection of atoms would pass straight through every time, the models covering this had said so, repeatedly, but not here. Someone owed me fifty fucking dollars.
I quirked a brow, opened my notebook to collect some scattered thoughts, and remained quiet. He breathed, but not hardly. He remained seated, distressed, but he never lashing out. It’s like he knew already, something deep in his subconscious. “Mr. Henderson, I need you to answer three questions for me. I promise it’s going to be all right. Understood?”
Once more, he nodded.
“Have… strange things happened to you before?”
He blinked. “You mean, like… h-have I seen bigfoot before?”
I didn’t mean to respond to him with a deadpan expression, but it’d come with the nature of the work. “Something like that.”
He shook his head once more. “N-No… no bigfoot, no alien abductions…. though my sister used to joke that she saw some men in black, once, haha… Runs in the family — “
“Next question: What were… you attempting to do? Swat a fly?”
He glanced from me, towards the state of his hand. “I… I wanted to see it.” His swallow was thick, breath dying in his throat. His voice was small, an undercurrent of disbelief in his words. “I’d been trying so many times, smacking it, failing to… to…”
An incredulous look colored my expression, as I took another note. “Really?”
“J-Just, tell me it’s going to be all right — “
“Should’ve seen the last person we helped,” I said. “Spontaneous combustion.”
His brows rose, the color falling from his face, dispelling the act. “Really…?” It looked like he wanted to laugh. “You intercepted the 911 call fast enough… maybe I’d get lucky, then?”
“Wouldn’t be much left of you to feel lucky, after something like that.”
“Nice…” His lips were dry. Wetting them, he swallowed and said: “What is the gnarliest case you’ve come across?” he asked suddenly, wanting to press further.
Ignoring him, I kept us on point. “Last question: though you already began to answer it… Any further next of kin?”
The last question was always the most difficult, always the one imbuing fear in a person’s eyes. But there was a push and pull here — not the story of earnest confusion, the want of a desperate animal, but a battle of interests; someone so distressed and understandably concerned, and with something darker behind it, something deliberate and tinged with irony. Was it satisfaction in his eyes? “J-Just.. just my sister, she lives twenty minutes from here… Will I see her again?”
“You will.” Pressure mounted the breadth of my shoulders, the gentle gnawing in the back of my mind that was the anticipation of his reaction. This part — the dreadful, mind-numbing process — was always the worst of it. Oftentimes it involved medical care, therapy, memory alteration… The Agency wanted these people reset to how they were before the incident, or at least as close as humanly possible — but the memory part, the people didn’t know about that. Henderson, though... This wasn’t bad luck, beset by sudden misfortune — this was planned. How many days, if not weeks or more, had he been trying to pull this off? No recording software, no eyewitness testimony — the garbage of his tins were piling up, dirty laundry cast upon the floor, and with that subtle stench wafting off him that was hard to suppress.
“However… I’m afraid we’re going to have to take the hand,” I replied, finally.
The problem wasn’t that he didn’t scream, shout, or cry.
He smiled at me.
