Part 1: Opening

I used to think I was a patriot. I served my country, I followed orders, and I kept my mouth shut. My name is Jack Reynolds, and until three years ago, I was a Senior Data Analyst working out of a sub-basement office near Arlington, Virginia.

My life was perfect. I had a beautiful wife, Sarah, a mortgage on a nice split-level in the suburbs, and a clearance level that made my neighbors think I was just a boring logistics manager. But my real job was scrubbing server logs for the Department of Defense. I was the guy who made sure digital trails disappeared.

It was a Tuesday, late October. The rain was hammering against the concrete outside, but down in the “hole,” the only sound was the hum of the cooling fans. I was running a routine sweep on a legacy server—stuff from the late 90s that was supposed to be archived. That’s when I stumbled onto a directory labeled “Project Red Sun.”

I should have deleted it. That was my job. But curiosity is a curse. I opened a folder dated 1973. It wasn’t code. It was video files.

My heart hammered against my ribs as I clicked play. The screen flickered with the grainy, unmistakable texture of 70s film. I saw a spacecraft window. I saw the Earth drifting away. But the timestamp… the timestamp didn’t match any Apollo mission. And then, at the 1:58 mark, I saw it. The red dust. The rust-colored horizon. And a human figure, walking on the surface of Mars.

I froze. My breath caught in my throat. We weren’t supposed to be there in ’73. We were told Apollo was canceled due to budget cuts. But this footage… it showed a base. A legitimate, operational base.

Then I found the other files. Spreadsheets. Lists of “Non-Terrestrial Officers.” A program called “Solar Warden.” It was a secret fleet. Space carriers. I felt the blood drain from my face. I wasn’t looking at a conspiracy theory; I was looking at a budget report for a civilization we didn’t know existed.

I copied the files to an encrypted drive. It was a reflex. A mistake.

That night, I drove home, my hands shaking on the steering wheel. Every pair of headlights in my rearview mirror looked like a threat. When I got home, Sarah was in the kitchen, making dinner. She smiled at me, but I couldn’t smile back. I felt sick. I had brought something into our home that was radioactive.

The phone rang at 3:00 AM. A mechanical voice. “We know what you took, Mr. Reynolds. Delete it, or we delete you.”

I hung up, sweating. I thought I could handle it. I thought I could go to the press, maybe find a journalist like the ones who covered Gary McKinnon. But I didn’t realize how deep the roots went. I didn’t realize that by opening that file, I hadn’t just broken protocol—I had signed my own d*ath warrant.

Part 2

The morning after I found the files, the sun rose over Arlington like a bruise—purple and swollen behind a thick layer of grey clouds. I hadn’t slept. I had spent the night sitting in the armchair by the window, peering through the blinds at the empty street. Every passing car felt like a predator. Every rustle of the wind in the oak trees sounded like a footstep.

I tried to maintain the routine. That was Rule Number One of any counter-intelligence briefing I’d ever sat through: Normalize behavior. If you panic, you signal guilt. So, I showered. I shaved, though my hand shook so badly I nicked my jaw, leaving a small bloom of bl*od on the white collar of my dress shirt. I kissed Sarah on the cheek. She was drinking coffee, scrolling through her phone, completely unaware that our life had effectively ended six hours ago.

“You’re heading in early?” she asked, not looking up.

“Big project,” I lied. My voice sounded hollow, like it was coming from a radio in the next room. “Might be late tonight.”

“Okay. Pick up milk on the way back?”

“Sure,” I said. “Milk.”

The banality of it almost broke me. I wanted to grab her, shake her, tell her that we needed to pack a bag and drive until the gas ran out. But where would we go? There is no ‘away’ when you are dealing with the people who built the map.

I drove to the Metro station, leaving my car in the usual spot. I didn’t want to drive all the way into the District; license plate readers are everywhere. On the train, I stood near the doors, clutching my briefcase. inside, buried in the lining, was the encrypted drive. It felt heavy, like I was carrying a chunk of uranium.

I looked around the car. A woman reading a Kindle. A teenager with headphones. A man in a grey suit reading the Post. Was he reading? Or was he watching my reflection in the glass? I started counting the seconds between stops to calm my heart rate.

When I swiped my badge at the turnstile of the secure facility in Pentagon City, the light didn’t turn green. It turned red. A sharp, angry buzz filled the air.

Access Denied.

My stomach dropped through the floor. I tried again. Buzz.

“Problem, Mr. Reynolds?”

I turned. It was Henderson, the shift security supervisor. We’d talked about the Redskins every Monday for five years. Today, his face was stone. He wasn’t looking at me like a friend. He was looking at me like a target. His hand was resting casually near his hip, not on his w*apon, but close enough.

“Badge must be demagnetized,” I stammered, forcing a smile that felt like rigor mortis.

“System says your clearance is flagged for a suspended audit,” Henderson said flatly. “You need to report to HR in the annex. Do not enter the secure zone.”

“Audit? I just went through my five-year review.”

“Just following the screen, Jack. HR. Now.”

I nodded and walked away, but I didn’t go to HR. I knew what waited for me in HR. A quiet room, a non-disclosure agreement, and two guys from the Defense Intelligence Agency waiting to escort me into a black van for a ‘debriefing’ that I might never return from.

I walked straight out of the lobby, pushed through the revolving doors, and hit the sidewalk. I walked fast. Not running, but walking with the intent of a man who realizes the walls are closing in. My phone buzzed in my pocket.

Unknown Caller.

I let it ring. It stopped. Then a text message popped up.

“HR is waiting, Jack. Don’t make a scene.”

I pulled the battery out of my phone—an old habit from the darker days of the job—and tossed the device into a trash can outside a Starbucks. I was a ghost now. Or at least, I had to try to be.

I needed money. Cash. Digital transactions leave a trail brighter than a flare gun. I ducked into a Bank of America on Clarendon Blvd. I walked to the ATM in the vestibule. I punched in my PIN.

TRANSACTION DENIED. CONTACT YOUR INSTITUTION.

I tried my credit card. Denied.

I walked to the teller window. The young woman smiled, asked for my ID, and typed my name. Her smile faltered. She typed again, harder this time. She looked up, her eyes darting to a silent alarm button under the desk. I saw the subtle shift in her shoulders.

“Mr. Reynolds, the system is showing a… a freeze. A federal hold. I’m going to need you to wait right here while I get the manager.”

“Keep the card,” I whispered.

I turned and ran. I didn’t care about looking normal anymore. They had cut the financial arteries. They were starving me out. This was the ‘soft kll’ protocol. They don’t need to shot you in the street if they can just delete your ability to exist. No money, no ID, no communications.

I spent the afternoon riding the city buses, switching lines every few miles, trying to spot a tail. I needed to think. I had the drive. That was my leverage. But leverage is only useful if you can use it. If I uploaded the files—the footage of the astronauts on Mars, the Red Sun mission logs—they would scrub it from the internet in seconds and then they would come for me with everything they had. I needed a reputable journalist. Someone with print protection.

I thought of Sarah. I had to get to her before they did.

I waited until dark to go back to the house. I parked the rental car I had managed to acquire—don’t ask how—three blocks away. I crept through the neighbor’s yard, feeling like a criminal in my own neighborhood.

The house was dark. Too dark. Sarah always left the porch light on.

I moved to the back door. It was unlocked. My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird. I pushed the door open.

“Sarah?” I hissed.

Silence.

I moved into the living room. The place had been tossed. Not a robbery-toss, but a professional search. The sofa cushions were slashed open. The drywall had been punched through in systematic intervals, searching for hidden cavities. Books were pulled off the shelves and shaken out.

On the dining table, sitting in the center of the chaos, was my laptop. It was open. The screen was smashed, the liquid crystal bleeding like black ink.

And taped to the screen was a note. Handwritten.

She is safe. For now. Location: The Red Sun files. Price: The Drive. Time: 24 Hours.

I fell to my knees. A sound escaped my throat, a guttural sob of pure rage and terror. They had taken her. They hadn’t k*lled her—not yet—because they needed the drive. They knew I had made a copy.

I stood up. The fear evaporated, replaced by a cold, hard clarity. They wanted a fight? Fine. But I wasn’t going to play by their rules. I wasn’t going to turn myself in. I was going to burn their whole secret world to the ground, even if I had to stand in the fire to do it.

I grabbed a kitchen knife—pathetic against what I was facing, but it was something—and headed for the door. I had 24 hours to find a way to trade a USB stick for my wife’s life, or 24 hours to expose the biggest lie in human history.

Part 3

The rain in D.C. feels different when you’re a wanted man. It feels heavier, like oil slicking your skin. I stood under the awning of a closed newsstand near Foggy Bottom, shivering. I had no coat. I had left everything behind.

I had used a payphone—one of the few remaining in the city, located in the back of a dingy laundromat—to call a number I’d memorized years ago. It belonged to David Weiss, an investigative journalist for the Post who had almost broken the “Solar Warden” story back in 2012 before his source mysteriously committed su*cide.

“Weiss,” he had answered on the first ring.

“I have the visuals,” I said. “1973. Red dust. The landing.”

There was a long silence on the line. “Who is this?”

“Does the name ‘Project Red Sun’ mean anything to you?”

“Meet me,” Weiss said, his voice dropping an octave. “The Diner on 18th. The back booth. One hour. Come alone. If you see a tail, abort.”

Now, I was moving toward the rendezvous. But I wasn’t alone.

I sensed them before I saw them. The ‘Ghost Team.’ That’s what we called them in the data analysis division. They were the physical cleaners. Two men, moving in parallel on the opposite side of the street. They wore casual clothes—hoodies, jeans—but they moved with the predatory grace of military operators. They weren’t looking at shop windows; they were scanning sectors.

I ducked into a crowded metro station entrance. The humidity hit me, smelling of ozone and damp wool. I vaulted the turnstile, ignoring the angry shout of the station manager. I needed chaos. I needed a crowd.

I pushed onto a waiting train just as the doors chimed. Through the closing glass, I saw one of the men sprint down the escalator, his hand reaching into his jacket. The doors hissed shut, and the train lurched forward.

I slumped against the metal pole, sweat stinging my eyes. I checked the drive in my pocket for the hundredth time. It was still there. My lifeline. Sarah’s ransom.

I got off two stops early and doubled back on foot, weaving through alleys, knocking over trash cans to create noise, creating a erratic pattern. By the time I reached the diner, my lungs were burning.

The diner was a relic of the 50s, chrome and neon reflecting in the rain-slicked street. I looked through the window. The back booth was empty.

No Weiss.

I checked my watch. I was five minutes late. He should be there.

Then, my phone—the burner I’d stolen from a gym locker earlier that day—rang.

“Jack,” a voice said. It wasn’t Weiss. It was smooth, synthetic, calm. “David couldn’t make it. He had a sudden… compliance issue.”

I froze, standing in the rain outside the diner. “Where is he?”

“That doesn’t matter. Look to your left.”

I turned. A black Lincoln Town Car was idling at the curb. The back window rolled down three inches. I couldn’t see a face, just the darkness inside.

“Get in, Jack. Let’s end this.”

“I have the drive,” I shouted, not caring who heard. “If I don’t walk away, it uploads automatically! I have a deadman’s switch!”

It was a bluff. I didn’t have a switch. I barely had a plan.

“We know you don’t,” the voice on the phone said. “We analyzed your technical capabilities hours ago. You’re a data analyst, Jack, not a hacker. You copied files. You didn’t build a protocol. Now, get in the car, or we send Sarah a very unfortunate package.”

I looked at the diner. People were eating burgers, laughing, drinking shakes. Life was happening just inches away, completely oblivious to the fact that monsters were real and they were parked at the curb.

I walked toward the car. My legs felt like lead. This was it. The climax of my pathetic little rebellion.

I opened the door and slid in. The interior smelled of leather and expensive cologne. The man sitting next to me was older, silver-haired, wearing a suit that cost more than my house. He looked like a grandfather.

“The drive,” he said, holding out a hand that was perfectly manicured.

“Where is she?” I demanded, clutching the plastic rectangle in my pocket.

“She is at a safe house in Maryland. She is sedated. Comfortable. If you give me the drive, she wakes up in her sister’s guest room tomorrow morning with a vague memory of a marital dispute and you leaving town. She lives a normal life. Without you.”

“And if I refuse?”

The man smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Then you become a tragic headlines. ‘Disgruntled Analyst K*lls Wife, Then Self.’ We control the narrative, Jack. We always have.”

He pulled out a tablet. On the screen was a live feed. It was Sarah. She was asleep on a cot in a small, white room. Her chest was rising and falling rhythmically.

“See?” he said. “She’s fine. The choice is yours. Truth… or Life?”

I looked at the drive. I looked at the video of the Red Sun landing stored on it. The proof that humanity had colonized Mars in the 70s. The proof of the slave labor, the nuclear wars of the past, the secret alliances. It was the biggest story in human history. It could change everything.

Then I looked at Sarah.

I realized then that I wasn’t the hero of this story. I was just a casualty.

“Let her go,” I whispered.

“The drive first.”

I pulled it out. My hand was shaking so hard I almost dropped it. I looked at it one last time—the red plastic casing catching the streetlights.

“You promise she walks?”

“We are professionals, Jack. We don’t create unnecessary bodies. She walks.”

I placed the drive in his palm. He closed his fingers over it.

“Good decision,” he said softly. He tapped the partition glass. The car began to move.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked, looking out at the passing city, the monuments glowing in the distance like tombstones.

“Nowhere,” he said. “We’re just going for a drive. You’re free to go, Jack. But not here. Not as Jack Reynolds.”

The car stopped three blocks later. The door unlocked.

“Get out,” he said.

I stumbled out onto the sidewalk. The car sped away, disappearing into the traffic. I stood there, empty-handed. I had lost the proof. I had lost the leverage. I had saved Sarah, but I had lost everything else.

I checked the burner phone. The live feed of Sarah cut to black. Then, a text.

She is released. Do not contact her. Do not return. You are dead.

I fell back against a brick wall and slid down until I hit the wet pavement. I put my head in my hands and wept. Not because of the fear, but because of the silence. The world kept spinning. The secrets were safe. And I was nobody.

Part 4

Epilogue: The Dust of the Desert

It has been three years since that night in D.C.

I don’t go by Jack anymore. The man named Jack Reynolds legally died in a kayaking accident on the Potomac shortly after he disappeared. There was an obituary. I read it in a library in Kansas City. It said I was a loving husband and a dedicated civil servant. It was the nicest lie they ever told about me.

I live in a trailer park on the edge of the Mojave Desert now, about an hour outside of Vegas. The rent is cheap, and the landlord takes cash. I work under the table as a mechanic at a scrapyard. It suits me. I spend my days taking broken things apart and trying to make them work again.

Sarah is okay. I checked once, a year ago. I shouldn’t have, but I had to know. I found a photo on her sister’s Facebook page. She looked older, tired maybe, but she was smiling. She had cut her hair short. She wasn’t wearing her wedding ring. That hurt more than the bullet I expected to take, but it was the deal I made. Her life for my silence.

But silence is a heavy thing to carry.

At night, when the desert heat breaks and the sky turns into a vast canopy of diamonds, I sit on the roof of my trailer with a cheap telescope I bought at a pawn shop. I point it at the red dot. Mars.

I know what’s up there.

I know that while the world argues about politics and gas prices, there are human beings living in domes in the Cydonia region. I know there are ships—massive, silent carriers—launching from the dark side of the Moon, ferrying supplies to a colony that “doesn’t exist.” I know about the face. I know about the nuclear scars in the soil that Dr. Brandenburg talks about.

Sometimes, when I’ve had too much cheap whiskey, I think about that drive. I think about the moment I handed it over. Did I do the right thing? I saved one life. My wife’s life. But I condemned the rest of the world to ignorance. We are living in a cage, unaware that the door is unlocked, unaware that there is a whole universe being hidden from us by men in expensive suits.

People call us crazy. They call us conspiracy theorists. They see a guy in a trailer talking about “Project Red Sun” and they laugh. They think it’s a movie. They think it’s science fiction.

I wish they were right. God, I wish it was just a story.

But I remember the video. I remember the date stamp: June 1973. I remember the astronaut’s voice, crackling over the comms, breathless and terrified, saying, “Houston, we are not alone here. They are watching us from the ridge.”

They took my name. They took my wife. They took my life. But they couldn’t take the memory.

I am writing this on a library computer, using a routed IP address. By the time anyone reads this, I’ll be gone. Moving on to the next town. The next shadow.

Don’t stop looking up. Don’t believe the official reports. Question everything.

My name was Jack Reynolds. And I saw the truth.